I've decided that for the rest of the summer I'm going to get as many translations of the Book of Mormon on Project Gutenberg as I can. I found TomeRaider (PDA) versions of the Spanish and Portuguese translations and will start reformatting them (assuming permission is granted) once I find a converter. I've got to talk to the Church about copyright clearance. I don't think that will be a problem, though. I'm pretty excited about this. For editions that aren't already online, I'm going to see if I can pull together a group to help with the scanning and OCRing and all that. Surely there are some people out there who would want to help. (And the nice thing is that there are plenty who have foreign language experience and can help with proofing.) Two months to get it going. We'll see how far we can get. I'm also going to put some other material on Project Gutenberg, like James E. Talmage's The Story of Mormonism (which was published in 1910, so copyright isn't an issue, provided that I can find a hard copy to get the title page and verso from).

I went shopping for missionary stuff today with my mom. Got most of it done. We still need to get shoes (expensive) and the suit (expensive). Other than that, I think we've covered it. Stuff is really cheap in Thailand, so if I've forgotten anything, it'll be easy enough to get it there. (They even have a Wal-Mart there.)

Finished reformatting the L.M. Montgomery books. I also scanned in the title pages and versos for them and submitted them to Project Gutenberg for copyright clearance. So, they're ready to go in as soon as I get clearance. I uploaded them here.

I've been playing around a lot with my keyboard mappings today. Speed, speed, speed. :) The colors on this laptop are sometimes washed out compared to desktop monitors. I'm not sure if it's an LCD thing or if there's a problem. It's been this way since I got my laptop, though, and as long as I don't look at another monitor for comparison, I'm fine. (It affects how my artwork looks on other computers, though.)

Signed up for Yahoo Messenger (crowderben). This journal seems to be almost entirely computer/etext-related. Sorry. :)

I'm almost done with Rainbow Valley. I still need to get copyright clearance...

I finished reformatting Kilmeny of the Orchard this morning. I still have to get copyright clearance on the books...

Signed up for AIM (bencrowder99). It was devilishly hard to find a username that wasn't alreay taken. Gaim is pretty cool. I also signed up for MSN Messenger (crowderben@hotmail.com).

I'm going to start research for part 2 of Vim Bits today. I put part 1 up on here in the new articles section: Vim Bits 1.

I decided to go ahead and write the second part of Vim Bits, so it's now up here: Vim Bits 2. It'll be on the UUG site shortly.

Here's the link to part 1 of my Vim article: Vim Bits 1. I can't wait to start on part 2...

I formatted two more chapters of Kilmeny of the Orchard. I really like that book. :)

Finished part 1 of my Vim article and posted it to the site. I'll get it up on here soon.

RELAX NG (an XML schema language) is really cool. I like it a lot more than XML Schema. At work I've decided to write the schema (the one I'm working on) in RELAX NG and then I'll try to convert it to XML Schema when it's done. Work, incidentally, is going quite well.

I upgraded to LyX 1.2.0 today. I really want to learn more LaTeX, though, since I'd rather hand-code LaTeX documents using Vim. I'm also tempted to learn PostScript (the language -- some people don't realize that it's a real programming language and not just a file type). But that will all have to wait till after my mission. Though I suppose I could learn how to write Thai in LaTeX... :)

I started memorizing the Thai alphabet this morning. It's coming along pretty well. I realized that if I wait to study Thai until I'm done with all these projects, I'll have wasted a lot of time, and I may never even get to start. So I'm going to split my time between Thai and the various projects (like the Vim article and PGSS and the etexts).

I think I'm going to start reading the Bangkok Post each day (it's Thailand's largest English-language newspaper). That way I'll know what's going on there (politically, mainly, but it'll also help provide recent flavor). I hardly ever read the newspaper nowadays, so I'm frightfully unaware of current events, other than the big ones like 9/11 that everyone talks about.

I've written about 2,000 words on the Vim article so far. It's ending up much longer than I anticipated. I think I'll break it up into four or five separate parts -- that way I can upload them as I finish them, rather than waiting for the whole thing to be completed.

I wrote my first real Vim key mappings today. In my journals (not this one), I start each day off with the date and day of the week in a certain format, and with one of them I use timestamps, so I decided to automate both of those. One map inserts the current date and the other inserts the current time. The latter was working fine until I started tinkering around with the status line, and now half of it doesn't work for some bizarre reason.

Is it already Friday? Goodness, that week went by fast. Only two more months until I leave. Wow. I decided that instead of cleaning up the source for Proofread, I'm just going to post it and let the new maintainer take care of that. So I did. I announced it on two local mailing lists I belong to and I'm going to put a note on the Project Gutenberg Software Site when it comes up.

This journal must be largely incomprehensible to most people, now that I think about it. Most of it is Linux- or computer-related. It must seem like I have no life outside of computers. :) I do...I think. Once I finish all these various projects I'm working on (the etexts, PGSS, etc.), I'll be spending most of my free time studying Thai and Thailand. I've fallen quite far behind on replying to e-mails in my rush to get these projects done. I don't imagine that it'll take more than a few more days to finish the four Montgomery etexts (two and a half are done), and PGSS should be coming up pretty soon and it'll be out of my hands (Daniel Webb is going to maintain it).

I wrote my first real schema (in XML Schema) today. Quite exciting. I downloaded Sun's Multi Schema Validator (MSV) and I can't even describe the emotions that poured through me when it validated successfully. ;) Xerces looks pretty cool as well, although it doesn't seem to be a full-fledged validator (but maybe it is).

I was talking with my mom today after work. She hinted that I was a wee bit too open on this site. At first I disagreed heartily, but then she said it didn't leave me very mysterious. Now, being a hopeless romantic, my ears perked up at the word "mysterious" and realized she was exactly right. Here I am, an unabashed romantic, being dully unromantic by eliminating all the mystery. So, over the course of the next week or two I'm going to scale it back a bit, closing up like a clam and becoming Mr. Mystery. ;) No, really, I am going to work on the site, but I'll still keep this journal on here and my writing and artwork and music and stuff like that (and of course all the stuff that isn't about me personally, like the VAIO page).

I've decided to finish this Vim article first (before the etexts, that is). I'm reading through all sorts of stuff on Vim. For over a year now (if not longer) I've been using ":wq" to save and exit, but today I rediscovered the "ZZ" command, which is one less keystroke and therefore much cooler. :) I'll have to re-train my fingers but it shouldn't be too hard. And "ZZ" only saves if there are changes. The reason to use Vim/vi (among many others) is speed. The less your hands have to move, the better. Right now I still use the arrow keys when editing text in Vim, but I want to train myself to use h/j/k/l so that I won't have to move my hand over. (Yes, we're talking milliseconds here. :))

Vim rocks. In my research for this article I've learned dozens and dozens of new things I never knew before. (And most of those are things I'll actually use, commands that'll speed me up or reduce typos or whatnot.) What's really cool is that Galeon lets you use 'j' and 'k' for scrolling. I discovered it quite by accident.

After submitting The Ball and the Cross to Project Gutenberg I found eleven more typos in it. It's amazing how many pop up even after a careful check. (I learned that many, many times when I was the high school newspaper editor.)

I've finished reformatting Further Chronicles of Avonlea and The Story Girl. I'm about halfway through reformatting Kilmeny of the Orchard. Kilmeny and Rainbow Valley will take longer because I have to convert the single spaces between sentences to double spaces. Oh well. :) I still need to get copyright clearance for all four books...

Last night I spent the evening picking peas with my family in our backyard. I rather like manual labor. There's something richly satisfying about working the land.

I love mornings! I've been an early riser for the past six or seven years and I wouldn't give up those beautiful mornings for anything. There's something magical about the morning before the sun rises.

I feel like I hardly have any free time anymore. But it's a good thing. :) (Even though it doesn't always feel like it, admittedly.) The Ball and the Cross is now officially on Project Gutenberg as etext #5265. Cool. :) I've reformatted two chapters of Further Chronicles of Avonlea and tonight I should be able to get half of it done. I really can't wait till I have a scanner and can do books on my own. Work's going well. I'm working on an XML schema at the moment for it.

I reformatted two chapters of Further Chronicles of Avonlea by hand, wrapping the lines at 65 characters (from the 80 or so they were originally). Just a few minutes ago I realized that Vim had to have a feature to do that automatically. And it does: the "gq" operator. (You've just been spared an awful pun, by the way. :)) I select the whole file in visual mode (though there's probably an easier way to do it), then type "gq" in command mode. Each line will be wrapped at whatever the textwidth variable is set to. (For Project Gutenberg texts I have it set at 65.) If I want to reformat the rest of the current paragraph, I just go to command mode and then type "gq}". (I'm sure there's a way to wrap the whole paragraph and not just the rest of it, but I haven't found it yet. [Note: it's "gqap"]) It's wonderfully nice and will save me a lot of time. I wish I'd known about it earlier...

Thanks to "gq", I was able to finish Further Chronicles of Avonlea in a fraction of the time. So it's done, but I can't submit it till I get copyright clearance.

I finished reformatting The Ball and the Cross (thank heavens for regular expressions! :)) and I'm submitting it to Project Gutenberg today. It's rather cool knowing one has finished a whole etext. When it's an official Project Gutenberg one that'll be even cooler. Last night I went to the BYU library and got the four L.M. Montgomery books that I'll be working on. I'm raring to do all sorts of etext work, but like I said in yesterday's entry, I really ought to be studying Thai.

Submitted The Ball and the Cross. I'm currently reformatting Further Chronicles of Avonlea.

I got permission to take four L.M. Montgomery texts from A Celebration of Women Writers (Rainbow Valley, Kilmeny of the Orchard, The Story Girl, and Further Chronicles of Avonlea) and submit them to Project Gutenberg. I'll have to reformat them (they're in HTML), of course. That's not a big problem, though. First I need to finish reformatting The Ball and the Cross and submit it. Then I'll do these Montgomery texts, and finally I'll finish the Icelandic primer. It's tempting to do lots more of this sort of work (since there are lots of other etexts out there, and getting permission is easier than I thought it would be, and reformatting texts is certainly much easier than scanning or typing them in). But I really ought to be preparing for my mission instead. After these etext projects I'll be done for the summer.

Oh, today Jim Tinsley of Project Gutenberg e-mailed me some output from different OCR packages (Abbyy, DocMorph, and gocr). The difference is amazing. Abbyy is incredible. Almost perfect, in fact. DocMorph didn't do so well on the image he used, but when I used it, it was almost flawless. There's no hope for gocr. :) If only I could get Clara OCR to work so I could see how it compares...

Got the four Montgomery books from the library. I'll need to compare them to the existing etexts to make sure they're the same editions (that's part of copyright clearance). And I need to either scan in the title page and verso or else photocopy them. I prefer scanning, since it takes less time.

I spent an hour or so working on the Project Gutenberg Software Site this morning. It'll go live within a few days. The Faq-O-Matic is really cool. I'm tempted to go on a marathon typing run and try to finish The Ball and the Cross today.

The New General Catalog of Old Books & Authors is quite cool. I really like how it lists the dates of the works in chronological order, so you can see which books are pre-1923 (necessary for Project Gutenberg copyright clearance). It even shows which are already on PG.

I spent two hours typing in The Ball and the Cross and finally finished it. I also proofed it and will submit it to Project Gutenberg shortly.

I've decided that I'm going to use two spaces between sentences in the Ball etext instead of one (why on earth I only used one is a very good question and I haven't a clue as to the answer). So I'll need to do about three hours of reformatting before I can submit it. Oh well.

OpenOffice rocks. :) It only takes 25 seconds to start on my machine, and the font system is pretty darn cool. I haven't played around with it very much yet, though. I've been very pleased with it so far. It's come a long way from the old StarOffice. :)

Work went well. I'm definitely getting the hang of XSLT and XPath. XPath is incredibly cool. Wait, didn't I say that yesterday? :) It's quite true, though. On Monday I get a new assignment, though I'm not sure yet what it'll be.

Has it really been a month and a half since I got my mission call? Good heavens, that went by fast. I haven't done much Thai study lately, which is entirely my fault. I've let myself get sidetracked with all of these different projects. I'm going to start a real study program soon, though.

I put in almost an hour and a half of typing in The Ball and the Cross. I'm pretty close now (220/254 pages). Within a week I'll finish it, certainly. And then I'll start working on the Icelandic primer again. (I've decided to finish Ball first, since doing two projects at once isn't as good an idea as I thought.)

I spent an hour or so this morning working on Linuxtype (mostly on the adding fonts page). I really need to figure out just how to add fonts to AbiWord and TeX. I downloaded OpenOffice.org 1.0 yesterday and I'll play around with that later on as well. It has been quite a challenge to add fonts to TeX and AbiWord (and I'm still unsuccessful), which makes me even more determined to figure it out. There's a lot of conflicting information out there (which is just what I found with the Wacom stuff, which is why I wrote my Wacom page). All I have to do is go through it all, figure out what works, and write it up. The hardest part is figuring out what works. While I was working on the adding fonts page, I discovered the README.fonts that comes with XFree86. I'd never seen it before, but it looks like a gem of a resource. That and the Font HOWTO are my two prime sources. The Font HOWTO hasn't been updated in two years, though, so it's getting out of date.

I realized that I needed a page to list all the projects I'm working on (since some of them won't fit anywhere else in the site -- for example, if I decide to play around with CSS and come up with a new layout, I need a place to put it). Thus Current Projects was born. It'll be a miscellanous catch-all bin for the small stuff I work on that would be hidden away otherwise (like Vim syntax highlighting files, for example).

Just got back from work. I read up on XML Schema and XSLT and XPath and started writing an XSLT file to transform some genealogical data. XPath is extremely cool. I really, really like working with XML and company.

I actually start tomorrow at MyFamily.com, not today. (They've got to find a machine for me.) The work there is tremendously exciting -- especially the XML stuff. I'm going to soak myself in XML today, and I think I'm also going to read the Gentech spec.

The Project Gutenberg Software Site will be going live within the next few days. It has changed a lot from the original vision, but it should be fairly useful, I think.

I spent the afternoon reading the XML Black Book (published by Coriolis). I meant to read the Gentech spec, but that didn't happen. (I've plenty of time to read it, though, so no big rush there.) I haven't done any work on The Ball and the Cross or the Icelandic primer for the last couple of days. But I suppose I have all summer...

I finished reading Anne of Avonlea this evening. Splendid book. At this rate I can certainly finish the whole series before I leave. They're technically "juvenile" books, but that label doesn't really mean a whole lot. In "On Stories," C.S. Lewis said, "It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then." And in "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said" he wrote, "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty -- except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all." Amen, wholeheartedly.

I've spent the morning helping my family out (mostly babysitting) and installing Red Hat 7.3 on my laptop. The install went pretty well and I'm almost set. I've also been reading Anne of Avonlea.

I upgraded to ALSA 0.9.0rc1. Note: if you're changing from 0.5.x to 0.9.x, be aware that card names are no long "snd-card-xxxx" but just "snd-xxxx". Not a big change, but it makes a difference.

I got the MyFamily.com job! :) I start tomorrow morning. I'm quite excited.

Yesterday I finished Anne of Green Gables and read 100 pages of Anne of Avonlea. I like it a lot. I also read the parts in L.M. Montgomery's journals that mentioned her writing of the first book (and the publishing and all that). Mmm. :)

I think I'm going to try formatting Project Gutenberg etexts in LaTeX. It shouldn't be too hard to do a really nice job of it -- proper fonts and all. Speaking of Project Gutenberg, the software site is coming along. It should go live within a few days. I haven't done anything with The Ball and the Cross in a while, so I think I'll work on that and the Icelandic primer today.

Oh, I finally upgraded to fluxbox 0.1.9. I just realized that I should have downloaded the bugfix patches first... (I'll do it later today and recompile.)

This morning I spent a few minutes analyzing my web logs. Turns out there are far more hits on my Linuxtype page than I thought there would be. I need to start working on it and get it in better shape than it is.

I upgraded to mutt 1.4. And I finally added some keybindings to mutt to let me easily browse my POP3 servers. That's much nicer than having to load up Mozilla Messenger (much faster, too). I've also upgraded to Mozilla 1.0 and Galeon 1.2.5.

I found the Xft-enabled RPMs for Mozilla 1.0. When installed, they give you antialiased fonts. Very nice. But when I installed them, I could only select from nine or ten fonts (all iso10646, which was odd). And it killed Galeon. So I'm compiling Mozilla from scratch against Gtk+ 2 right now. We'll see how well that works...

I discovered DjVu this morning and have been quite captivated by it. The Any2DjVu service is a nice alternative to DocMorph (for OCRing). You can extract the text from a DjVu file, and it stores the image in a very compact format, so it's pretty darn nice.

I took my little brothers to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones today. After seeing the trailers, I thought it was going to be an abysmal failure, even worse than The Phantom Menace. But I was wrong. It's still not up to par with Lord of the Rings, but it was a lot better than I expected. The music, of course, was absolutely wonderful. I really like the love theme (I think that's what it's called). The acting wasn't as horrid as the trailers made it look. Being a romantic, the romance got to me (although it was rather cheesy at parts). Now for the complaints. I actually don't have that many -- my main one is that there's far too much immodesty (almost entirely on Padme's part). The acting could have been better. And that's about it. The Yoda fight scene was pretty cool.

I hadn't read much of Anne of Green Gables lately until the other day. (I got through two-thirds of it but then stopped for whatever reason.) But now that I've started again, I've completely fallen in love with it. I'm going to try to read the rest of the books in the series before I leave in August.

I'm tempted to start typing in an old 1911 book I have, Medieval Europe (by H.W.C. Davis). It's not too long (250 somewhat small pages) and would be rather fun. But it'll have to wait till after I finish typing in The Ball and the Cross.

I used to use "e-text," but I think I'm going to use "etext" from now on. It makes things simpler, although aesthetically I think I like the former more. Not that it really matters. :)

Had a second interview at MyFamily.com today. I won't know till Monday or Tuesday if I got the job or not. (The CTO has to make the decision.)

Did 17 more pages of the Icelandic primer. The work is coming along quite nicely.

When I get back from my mission, I'm going to buy a scanner and start scanning and OCRing old language texts from the university library. There are lots of old books from the 1800s that would clear copyright easily. I think my first project after I get back will be Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer (1905) and Anglo-Saxon Reader (1894). I wanted to do Champollion's Grammaire Egyptienne (I already have the images), but Egyptian hieroglyphs aren't yet part of Unicode. Maybe by the time I get back... But there are lots of Latin and Greek grammars that wouldn't be too hard to encode (Latin especially -- the only odd characters would be the vowels with macrons over them, and those are easy enough). The whole etext movement is terrifically exciting to me, if it isn't obvious. :) I also want to etextify Stanley's Through the Dark Continent, which is his account of his trip to Africa after Livingstone's death. If I have a scanner, I'll be able to put the books on Distributed Proofreaders, which can probably proof them a bit faster than I can. (It depends on how popular the book is.)

The uniprint utility that comes with Yudit is extremely cool. It can print a text file using any TrueType font. And it actually works. No hassles with converting the file to Type 1 and listing it in a fonts.dir and making an AFM file and such. All you do is give it the font name on the command line and it works perfectly. Yum. :)

It would be really nice if you could categorize your fonts (in Linux). Yes, you can put them in different directories, but that doesn't help when you're actually selecting the font. I'm envisioning something like the bookmarks in a browser. I doubt it'll ever happen, though. I have 829 fonts installed right now. It's rather unwieldy.

I don't know why I didn't do this before, but today I added the Etexts page. There aren't many projects on Distributed Proofreaders at the moment.

Well, I'm 99% better. The cough is virtually nonexistent, though it still pops up from time to time (but very rarely). It's very nice to be normal again. :)

I downloaded Clara OCR this morning. I'm thinking about OCRing Henry Sweet's An Icelandic Primer and submitting it to Project Gutenberg (after cleaning up the text, of course). Clara OCR looks like the most promising free OCR software, but I must have been doing it wrong, since it would only recognize the letters I'd trained it to recognize (the ones I'd clicked on). Training it is a lot of fun, by the way. I could spend hours doing it. I'm serious. :) But the point isn't to click on every single letter on the page. I also tried GOCR, with limited success (but more than with Clara OCR). It'll take a lot of clean-up. I've also got to figure out how to get the Icelandic characters entered in. Perhaps I'll have to use Unicode.

I don't think it's going to work after all. I'll have to look around and see if there are any other free OCR programs available. I'm rather interested in finding out what options there are for entering foreign characters. Unicode, yes -- are there any others? I think Unicode is the only real option. Is mixing ASCII and Unicode kosher? Perhaps the best way to put something like the Icelandic grammar online is to do it in XML/HTML using normal text for the most part and Unicode entities when necessary.

I've realized that I won't have time to work on Proofread after all. I'm involved in too many other things at the moment. I really want to see it finished, though, so I'm going to try to find someone else who's interested in it. If you think you'd like to try your hand at it (it's written in C using Gtk+), let me know. It's already usable, and all it really needs is some bug fixes before it's solid.

I'm OCRing the Icelandic primer through DocMorph, a free web OCR service. It's rather slow (by nature of uploading the images and so on), but it works.

It took about an hour to OCR the Icelandic primer. There'll be a lot of cleanup. I'm thinking I'll put it in HTML using the Unicode entities for the non-ASCII characters.

I've cleaned up all the prefatory material and the first thirteen pages. It takes a devilishly long time, especially since there are so many italics (which I put underscores around in the text). I'm using xterm with the "-u8" setting. (The full command is "xterm -u8 -fg gray -bg black -geometry 90x31+220+175 -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1".) Once I have that running, I open the text file in Vim. I decided to rename all the OCRed files to .ice (from .txt), so that I could put a "au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ice set encoding=utf-8" line in my .vimrc (that tells Vim that all .ice files are in Unicode). To enter the foreign characters, I just have to type Ctrl-V followed by a 'u' and then the hex code for the character (an o with an ogonek (ǫ), for example, is 01EB, so I type "Ctrl-V u 01EB" to produce it). So far I haven't run into a character I can't reproduce with Unicode. (There is an o with an ogonek and a diaresis on top of it, but luckily there's a combining diaresis, so I just insert the o/ogonek and then the diaresis (which is hex 0308, FYI).) The cleaning-up process is going along very well. I'm very pleased. It's slow, of course, but it's a lot more fun than typing in The Ball and the Cross. I'm even learning a bit about Old Icelandic in the process. :) Right now I'm making a text file out of the primer, but the really useful one will be the HTML conversion (which I'll do at the end). I'm thinking about an XML version as well, but that can wait. Vim has pretty good Unicode support, provided that you have the right font on your terminal. Yudit is nice for checking the files and making sure they're okay.

I've started playing around with PHP and MySQL. I didn't have MySQL installed initially, so I installed it (along with PostgreSQL, which I'll try later on). Then I found that I hadn't installed the php-mysql RPM, so I did that. I typed in a very simple guestbook application from the book I'm reading and it actually worked. Very cool. I'm rather tempted to convert this whole site over to MySQL. I'll have to learn more about it first, to make sure it'll do what I want it to do. My only problem with putting the site in a database is that I like to edit it on my laptop while I'm disconnected, and I'm not sure if I can still change my content locally and upload it somehow. Considering that almost everyone's using database-driven websites nowadays, it must not be much of a problem.

I'm almost completely recovered. The cough pops up a handful of times a day, but nothing major. It's very nice to be back to normal. :) It'll take another day or two before I can say I'm really back to health, though.

I've spent a few hours today working on the Project Gutenberg Software Site. We've decided that it will focus on e-text software in general rather than on programming specifically. PHP is very cool. I thought it would take a serious effort to get my forms to send mail through PHP, but it was insanely easy. And it worked perfectly the first time. I was very pleased with how well it worked. I think the site is getting close to completion (completion being the ability to go live).

Hmm, for some reason these last few days I've been rather tempted by Lisp, Perl, and assembly language. I don't know why, but there it is. I went to the library on Saturday and got a book on PHP and MySQL and I think that's the next thing I want to tackle. I may end up using MySQL for the Project Gutenberg Software Site (PGSS from now on) -- it would make the search feature much easier to code. We'll see.

I haven't worked on Proofread at all for a long time. Right now I'm focusing on PGSS, typing in The Ball and the Cross (80-some pages left), and helping my family. I still have almost three months to work on Proofread, though.

Audacity is quite cool. I haven't played around with it much, but I really like what I see. Very nice interface. I'll probably use it more than Snd in the future.

Is it really June already? Time passes by far too quickly. My cough is almost gone. I'm much better. Not completely, but close enough. It feels wonderful to be almost recovered.

I collected a bunch of links to Project Gutenberg-related projects (for the site I'm working on). I think I'm going to have to rely mainly on people finding the site and adding projects themselves, since there's no resource (that I've found) with links to stuff like this.

I went to the local Thai restaurant with some friends for dinner. It wasn't as spicy as I thought it would be. (It was no doubt toned down for American sensitivities, but even then it wasn't that spicy.) Next time I go I'll have to ask for a spicier dish. It was good, though. I love rice, so I'm definitely going to the right place. :)