Cleaning out my Closet

I spent most of last night listening to Ladytron and old Radio 4 comedy serials, while digitising photocopies of books about artificial languages. Back in the early 90s, the only reliable way to copy a book was with a photocopier - or a professional transcription typist if you could afford one. So, when I borrowed rare books from libraries, I took the (somewhat) cheaper option.

Interlingua is done, Volapuk is in progress, and I'll do Eurolengo when I find the box it's in. There's also Esperanto (obviously), and at least one natural language - Swahili.

Two hundred pages of formatted text in a half-megabyte PDF. Equivalent to thirty seconds of mp3 music, three seconds of divx video, or one ten thousanth of a Windows 2000 installation. Amazing, really.

When scanners became faster and higher quality in the late 90s, I used them to make digital photocopies, in TIFF or PNG form. There's some CDs in front of me containing twelve books on politics and philosophy.

You may not believe me, but I always knew something like the current technology would come along eventually, and I could turn my clunky copies into something much better. The same way I knew all those albums I put together using 8-bit samples and taped TV snippets were preliminary work for something years down the line.

All you need is inhuman patience and lots (and lots) of storage space.

The new scanner arrived today - an OpticBook 3600, for a reduced one hundred and sixty something pounds. It's taken us all day to figure out how to make it work. So I get the old scanner in my room. That's the old Cannon scanner, not the old HP one or the newish HP one or the ancient one without a logo.
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The Strict Machines are continuing their roll towards domination of the local music scene, tonight amplified through my microphones. I was too exhausted to go and see them this time, but they're asking for some future performances to be recorded, and we're looking at recording a full length album of 'unplugged' work.
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It seems that in a moment of madness I agreed to attend some godawful conference next Sunday. The is one thing scarier than a large room full of socialists disagreeing. A thousand socialists who all agree with each other.
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It's rained each day for the last six. The wind has blown just like it's supposed to in Autumn - judging by the speed of the clouds it's blowing very hard at high altitudes, But the air is still warm, as though it were still summer.