Random stuff

I just got the first transcript back from the transcriptionist, and it’s great! She’s cleaned it up a lot (unless you’ve tried transcribing tapes before, you have NO idea how scattered and full of ums, ers, and ahs human speech is) and turned it into something I can work with easily. I can scan seven pages of text a LOT faster than an hour of tape, that’s for sure.

Now, of course, this leaves me with a new challenge: how to index and file the mounds and mounds of paper she’s happily generating.

(Actually, she’s generating email after email of Word files, which I translate into mounds and mounds of paper. Someday I really must get that direct-transfer-of-information USB port shunted into my brain.)

Anyway, I’m now thinking about how to keep track of all these phenomenal stories, and haven’t really come up with good ideas. I’m fighting the urge to put together a database to contain them…I’ve been studying how to build Access databases at work, so right now everything looks like an excuse to use my new toy.

I’ve started knitting up the tiger lily shawl (got bored with swatching it). It’s going pretty well, I’ve got most of the first pattern (a modified lily-of-the-valley pattern) going. I’ll need to work out the details of the next pattern soon.

And, I’m very excited–next week I get to meet the guy who wrote The Erotic Mind! This is a great deconstruction of human eroticism that I read about five or ten years ago, and thought was phenomenally brilliant–it’s the only work I’ve read that goes beyond the how-to guide to sex and talks about the mental part (which is, of course, the most important/interesting part). If you get a chance, read it–it’s been reprinted recently. The author is Jack Morin. I’d write more about it, except that it’s late and I’m getting tired. Maybe tomorrow…