A. Lala is funny about our aminals.
B. I wrote another 1750 words, for a total of 3500 for the first two days of Nanowrimo. I hope. I’m writing at work, and I have no way to ship my writing out of here and no way to officially count words. Because of where I work, I can’t bring in any memory devices, no disks or memory sticks, and the computers that we work on are not connected to the outside world in any way, including to the internets. We have a separate internet computer to share, but I would never hog it in order to Nano at work. That’s just wrong. And it’s so NICE to have a job where I’m paid to know what to do and when to do it — but when there’s nothing going on, it’s not like I have to polish the silver or anything.
So I am left with two choices:
1. Write longhand. Response: No way in hell am I going to retype all that. Plus, I write so SLOWLY by hand compared to how I type.
2. Type it out on the computer in front of me. Response: This is what I’m doing, but I tell you, it’s WEIRD to write, print it out to hardcopy and then erase all trace of what I’ve spent hours on. I’m so used to saving and re-saving and saving to disk and saving online… I’ve ordered scanner OCR software (ReadIris 11 for Mac – any users? Advice?), and even if I only get 85% accuracy (Apple says it’s more like 99% accuracy), I’ll be saving time. But to have those words, uncounted, only on paper…. it’s just weird, man.
C. Whooops. I don’t have a C. That’s it. Mwah.
OMG — I laughed and laughed at Lala’s story – for sure something I would do too… which is probably why I laughed so hard …. thanks
and good work on all the writing – btw are you going to edit etc your story and resubmit it to a publisher – I really really want to read the whole thing….
ok I am officially an idiot – which you already knew – I just read blog posts I had missed somehow and see that you ARE going to do exactly what I said with the book.
And on the band on tv – I wanted to see more of them – but I guess that is too much to ask when the show is trying to focus on those woman who should never ever end up with a cowboy.. 😀 but listening to the band would have been much better than the rest of the show
No e-mail at work?
And . . . you COULD write notes, jot down ideas and story lines in longhand . . . not actually doing the writing, but plotting out what you’re going to sit at the computer that evening and actually WRITE.
ROFLMAO on Lala’s post! Sitting here giggling like a maniac, swear. Black humor will getcha through when nothing else will.
Good luck with the writing – the OCR sounds like the best solution, ’cause man…I can’t imagine doing it in longhand. Gnarf. May your computer love the software and cohabit blissfully.
It’s been a couple of years since I used OCR software and I don’t recall if it’s the same one you’re planning on using, but it was surprisingly good. The tip I would share is to be sure to scan the pages as straight as possible. It gets really bad when the lines aren’t straight. Avoid odd characters – you can easily add those later, though the recognition’s probably gotten better since I used it.
And hopefully your printouts are fairly clean and clear. If so, it won’t be bad at all!
I used to work on some intelligent character recognition (ICR) software, recognises handwriting and stuff. Provided you’ve used a relatively clear font and a reasonable text size and keep it straight, OCR should be pretty good.
I do quite a lot of OCR stuff using Readiris10 in Windows.
It’s pretty good as long as you make sure that the page you are scanning is square and I have found that scanning the page into Wordpad rather than Word gives better accuracy – no idea why – I just scan it into wordpad then cut and paste it into Word afterwards. Hope that helps
Gawd, Lala’s post is hilarious! I’m so delighted to “know” people who humor their animals’ quirks the way we do in our family. I am always afraid to mention it publicly, because it seems everybody I know dumps Purina Whatever Chow in a dish and that’s it.
As for the writing, I had an epiphany of another sort this week. I tried, I really did, to start writing about the last few years of my life, using my trusty wee MacBook. And I discovered that I couldn’t get past the first paragraph, because I started editing it immediately. So I learned this much: I’m not ready to put it in type on a screen yet. I felt PTSD breathing on the back of my neck when I tried to describe the day my husband collapsed. Not ready. And also, I am MUCH better with writing longhand, because there is no delete key.