Grinding away at life's details

An interesting set of circumstances caused me to start looking for a particular book, then books, only then to find them together in the same box, in the garage.

I'd been looking for my two-volume Alford Russian-English technical dictionary for a couple of weeks, now. I could have sworn these books were among the first out of the box upon moving into this house. It's not in any nook or cranny of my office, nor in the closet (which now doubles as an annex to my library :^). As I sometimes have the wonderful ability to not see something directly in front of my nose, I was preparing to really rip through the closet in search of the Alford.

Then, a serendipitous reference to the Voynich manuscript on Lantra-L caused me to think about David Kahn's The Codebreakers, which devotes some pages to this manuscript that has evaded every effort to date to unlock its secrets. And I noticed that among the cryptography books I've seen around here lately, the Kahn volume is, um, not there.

Don't ask me how, but I knew this immediately, even without having looked for it. The Kahn book is one of those books that I can identify at ten paces, in the dark, with my eyes closed. Seriously, it's a large, heavy book with a white dust jacket that never passes consciously through my hands without my opening it up to lap up a paragraph or two.

This caused me to do a good rummage through the garage, which hasn't occurred in several weeks. Besides consolidating some garbage, I ended up finding a small, innocuous box that - surprise! - contained both the Alford volumes and the Kahn book!

Another consequence of the visit to the garage is a box chock full of unlabeled tape cassettes. Somewhere among these are some cassettes I'd rather not lose (such as the one I recorded upon first visiting my father's grave in Ligonier, Indiana in 1994). So I have embarked upon a "listen" of each tape. Right now, I'm half-listening to a tape of a telephone conference held in 1992 when I was consulting for IBM out of Colorado.

My Windows machine continues to reboot spontaneously, which is really beginning to annoy me, now that I am using it for production work. It rebooted spontaneously around noon, and then around 5 pm, it threw a non-recoverable exception in VFAT. Each time, I lost about 5 minutes of work that was fairly easy to reconstruct. I suspect that the CPU is still overheating, though I am not sure how this relates to the VFAT problem. All I can propose is to continue to observe the behavior of the machine.

Anyway, it's about half an hour to tonight's rerun of The X Files, so I guess it's the right time to relax and kick back.

Cheers...

Writing about talking...

Tape recorders are seductive devices. They offer the ability to capture sound over some period of time, which makes it possible to `relive' some moments repeatedly, or even simply once at some later time. On the other hand, it generally takes as long to `relive' the moment as it took to `do' the moment in the first place. And in conformance with Sturgeon's Law (i.e., 95% of everything is crap), the bits one wants to hear are typically scattered at random in along with a lot of miscellaneous noise.

As a brief digression, I remember my first cassette tape recorder, which was bought with the idealistic idea of recording my lectures in college. This, in turn, would allow me to review them afterward for any nuggets I may have missed while in `live' attendance. That idea lasted about a week, since it rapidly became apparent that there was no way that I was going to listen to each lecture twice (not to mention the bother of dragging the recorder and power supply around with me). Freshman calculus, chemistry, and physics were completely unintelligible the first time around; repeating the lecture didn't help. (Compare this to some Japanese participants in the International Space Station program. They will record the proceedings of a meeting, and then go back and play back the recording several times, or until they completely understand what went on. With this kind of approach, the rather shaky English language skills of these folks will become very strong, very quickly. My hat's off to them.)

And so - returning to my digression - my cassette recorder in college was relegated in my freshman year to the status of a player of tunes, and the occasional recording of lectures that I'd otherwise miss by my absence. (By the end of my sophomore year, I'd stopped bothering about the lectures I'd missed, as the value of any individual lecture rapidly approached zero in my college career, but that's another story.)

With the advent of the microcassette player, the ability to make recordings became more widespread. You could walk around with a recorder that didn't put much of a dent in your pocket, nor a large footprint on your desk, but I never really found much of a use for one. Which is to say I treated it about the same as a regular cassette recorder. As with its cousin that used standard cassettes, I used my first microcassette recorder to capture discussions, which got old rather quickly. Then I tried to limit its use to making short verbal notes, but found that it was more trouble than it was worth to go back and try to find and make sense of those notes later. More than once, I found myself recording over a tape whose contents were unknown to me, primarily because the need to make a recording was urgent, and there was no `spare' tape lying around.

What I have always had a need for (or maybe I just think I've had a need for) has been the ability to make short notes orally, either of the "Joe's phone number is 555-1234" or "remember to send the VISA payment" kind, or something more philosophical, based on an observation or an experience of mine. The recent appearance of cheap, lightweight units that hold tens of minutes of voice data and which can hold messages in `containers' seems to fit the bill. About a year ago, I bought a Panasonic `IC Recorder' that holds 60 minutes of voice-quality recorded sound in up to 100 messages that are date- and time-stamped.

My primary complaint with the unit has to do with depressing the `Record' button by accident, which exhausts the recording time on capturing the sound of spare change jangling in my pocket. There is a `Hold' switch on the unit to prevent exactly this from happening, but it's a pain in the neck to use.

My secondary complaint is independent of the unit and has to do with the nature of audio data: it takes time to assimilate it and recast it as something more usable. My unit recently surfaced out of a pile of junk that had accumulated as the result of the move, and I only got around today to listening to the notes that I'd made over a year ago! It's a slow process, compounded by the fact that transcription is one of my less favorite activities (even if I am the object of the transcription!). To its credit, the unit retained all recorded notes even though the AA batteries that powered the unit were well and truly dead as the result of the unit's hibernation in the junk pile.

Cheers...

P.S. I'm listening to the Russian version of `Voice of Russia' right now. They're placing some heavy story emphasis on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atom bombing 55 years ago, repeating the claims of those who say that there was no military reason to use the A-bomb on Japan. No mention of the losses anticipated during operation `Olympic' (the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands), nor the fact that the number of victims of that first atom bomb was smaller than the number that died in the conventional bombing of several other targets during the war, including Dresden in Germany and Tokyo in Japan. There's also a report to the effect that three Red Cross workers have gone missing in Georgia. It can be a nasty world, out there.