I've been nudged
Well, I've been nudged so I guess I should sit down and marshall some thoughts and events and post something.
First off, everyone is probably interested in hearing how things with Samuel are going. He's growing very fast and it seems like he's hitting milestones at an appropriate rate. I'm really liking how he's becoming more able to interact with both of us and be intent on the world around him. My favorite parts of dealing with him are when we're doing something like reading or just talking and he'll give me these giant smiles and try to talk to me with coos and various other noises. He's just starting to develop a bit of a giggle and I hope that turns into a full-fledged laugh sometime soon. That will be great and I hope I find all the little triggers that set him off! The parts I don't like are when he cries of course. Much of the time I can help to deal with it, but sometimes I do feel a bit useless when what he needs is for me to hand him off for some food or attention from someone else.
Now, for a bit of a book review. Normally I read science fiction and fantasy and don't usually post about the books I read. I suppose I could sometime. However, sometimes I decide to branch out a bit. One example of that recently is that something reminded me of the book "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. I think it was a post by greatbigsky. I had first heard of that book in a non-fiction book "Habeas Codfish" which is about food and the law. Apparently the Jungle was crucial in the development of the FDA and much stricter regulation of the food industry due to its fictional descriptions of the Chicago meat-packing industry.
Anyway, I was able to get it off of Project Gutenberg, so I threw it on the ol' ebook reader and gave it a go. Overall, I think it's incredibly well written. You do end up caring for the main character and the trials he goes through. And GOOD-ness, there are plenty of trials. Apparently, Mr. Sinclair was a Socialist and his goal in writing the book was to showcase the ways in which a capitalist system exploits the workers and society, and does not care for their welfare so that in the end he can give us a long speech on how much better things would be in a Socialist system.
This speech is the end of the book and there isn't really very good closure on how things work out for the main character. I can't say I found his arguments for Socialism really convincing because I don't think they were really backed up, even by the contents of the rest of the novel.
Speaking of Project Gutenberg, while I was looking at things to read there I was reminded of the existence of the Distributed Proofreaders project. So, I figured I'd look into it a bit more and so I registered and have been proofreading pages occasionally for them as well. The idea of course, is that "many hands make light work". They make page-scans and the OCR'd text available on line and then proofread it through a series of reviews and formatting for eventual inclusion in the Project Gutenberg archives. It's quite easy to get involved and pretty useful, so if you're so inclined, check it out.
To follow a chain of reasoning further, I was then being interested in OCR software, so I put Karin's scanner on the computer and was playing with the OCR software that came with it. Got to thinking about what books would be simple to processs, that are hard to find and would be good to have a copy of. I think it was a night where Karin was supposed to have knitting so eventually I thought about an old book that Karin had originally checked out from the library in college when doing a project, "The Manly Art of Knitting". It's a small book of knitting instruction with the target audience of men. I also remembered that it had a pattern for a hammock in it, and I've been thinking it might be neat to have a hammock.
So, I checked the book out through inter-library loan to look it over and possibly copy. Of course, to be legal I would need to get permission from the author to create a copy. So, I managed to find the publisher's web page and shot off an email to them to see if they had the author's contact info after all this time. They did not, but they were able to tell me where he used to live. I was able to find him in the online white-pages and gave him a call. We had a very neat discussion about the book, the publishing industry, his life, etc. It was fun. However, he had sold the publishing rights to Scribners and was unsure if he had the rights to grant copy permission. I'm pretty sure he does, but not going to push thing too much. Especially since he offered to send me three copies of the book for essentially the cost of shipping.
So, thatkaringirl and I are keeping a copy, musicsmurf and exodus31 have already shown interest in the other, and I'd be willing to pass the final copy on to someone who would make good use of it, or perhaps is just interested. The only thing I ask is that if I decide to give/sell it to you, please don't resell it. The used copy price from Abe Books is apparently something like $75-$300 and the last copy on Ebay went for at least $60, so there are people willing to possibly pay a significant amount for them. That's not the spirit in which I'm receiving them from the author though so I don't want to turn it into that. Let me know if you're interested.
First off, everyone is probably interested in hearing how things with Samuel are going. He's growing very fast and it seems like he's hitting milestones at an appropriate rate. I'm really liking how he's becoming more able to interact with both of us and be intent on the world around him. My favorite parts of dealing with him are when we're doing something like reading or just talking and he'll give me these giant smiles and try to talk to me with coos and various other noises. He's just starting to develop a bit of a giggle and I hope that turns into a full-fledged laugh sometime soon. That will be great and I hope I find all the little triggers that set him off! The parts I don't like are when he cries of course. Much of the time I can help to deal with it, but sometimes I do feel a bit useless when what he needs is for me to hand him off for some food or attention from someone else.
Now, for a bit of a book review. Normally I read science fiction and fantasy and don't usually post about the books I read. I suppose I could sometime. However, sometimes I decide to branch out a bit. One example of that recently is that something reminded me of the book "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. I think it was a post by greatbigsky. I had first heard of that book in a non-fiction book "Habeas Codfish" which is about food and the law. Apparently the Jungle was crucial in the development of the FDA and much stricter regulation of the food industry due to its fictional descriptions of the Chicago meat-packing industry.
Anyway, I was able to get it off of Project Gutenberg, so I threw it on the ol' ebook reader and gave it a go. Overall, I think it's incredibly well written. You do end up caring for the main character and the trials he goes through. And GOOD-ness, there are plenty of trials. Apparently, Mr. Sinclair was a Socialist and his goal in writing the book was to showcase the ways in which a capitalist system exploits the workers and society, and does not care for their welfare so that in the end he can give us a long speech on how much better things would be in a Socialist system.
This speech is the end of the book and there isn't really very good closure on how things work out for the main character. I can't say I found his arguments for Socialism really convincing because I don't think they were really backed up, even by the contents of the rest of the novel.
Speaking of Project Gutenberg, while I was looking at things to read there I was reminded of the existence of the Distributed Proofreaders project. So, I figured I'd look into it a bit more and so I registered and have been proofreading pages occasionally for them as well. The idea of course, is that "many hands make light work". They make page-scans and the OCR'd text available on line and then proofread it through a series of reviews and formatting for eventual inclusion in the Project Gutenberg archives. It's quite easy to get involved and pretty useful, so if you're so inclined, check it out.
To follow a chain of reasoning further, I was then being interested in OCR software, so I put Karin's scanner on the computer and was playing with the OCR software that came with it. Got to thinking about what books would be simple to processs, that are hard to find and would be good to have a copy of. I think it was a night where Karin was supposed to have knitting so eventually I thought about an old book that Karin had originally checked out from the library in college when doing a project, "The Manly Art of Knitting". It's a small book of knitting instruction with the target audience of men. I also remembered that it had a pattern for a hammock in it, and I've been thinking it might be neat to have a hammock.
So, I checked the book out through inter-library loan to look it over and possibly copy. Of course, to be legal I would need to get permission from the author to create a copy. So, I managed to find the publisher's web page and shot off an email to them to see if they had the author's contact info after all this time. They did not, but they were able to tell me where he used to live. I was able to find him in the online white-pages and gave him a call. We had a very neat discussion about the book, the publishing industry, his life, etc. It was fun. However, he had sold the publishing rights to Scribners and was unsure if he had the rights to grant copy permission. I'm pretty sure he does, but not going to push thing too much. Especially since he offered to send me three copies of the book for essentially the cost of shipping.
So, thatkaringirl and I are keeping a copy, musicsmurf and exodus31 have already shown interest in the other, and I'd be willing to pass the final copy on to someone who would make good use of it, or perhaps is just interested. The only thing I ask is that if I decide to give/sell it to you, please don't resell it. The used copy price from Abe Books is apparently something like $75-$300 and the last copy on Ebay went for at least $60, so there are people willing to possibly pay a significant amount for them. That's not the spirit in which I'm receiving them from the author though so I don't want to turn it into that. Let me know if you're interested.