mandarine

I am stalled about halfway through ‘Night and Day’. I’ve been painfully trudging along for a month now, and I still have not found anything special to keep me going except the beautiful language and my stubborn pride. To start with, I was under the impression that the first pages had been torn, or that I was reading a second episode before having read the first one. I was missing context for every sentence. This meant I had to store each bit of information, not knowing whether the color of the teacups, the mood of the weather, or the shape of the gas light on the pavement would be of any use for further understanding as the plot and characters slowly gathered more flesh. This requires considerable effort, all the more so because I also need context to help me with vocabulary.

After fifteen chapters, [more]

Maybe you remember my Christmas e-book stack. After I had downloaded a whole shelf worth of e-books, representing the space of a USB stick, I wondered whether there was a thing I could do to contribute in return. Obviously, I could donate money to the Gutenberg project. But I found better: I found I could contribute by proofreading scanned pages so that they could be turned into free quality e-books.

The distributed proofreaders website organises the work of online volunteers who show up when they feel like proofreading a few pages. The unofficial target is one page a day — I prefer to do seven pages a week. I have found it a marvellous way to contribute, and a great way to get to know books in a totally new fashion. As I write this post, I am correcting OCR mistakes in Hector Berlioz’s Correspondance Inédite. It almost feels as if I am Berlioz’s editor, 138 years after his death.

You might want to give it a try if you feel you have the soul of an editor, if you believe classics are the property of all, if you like to discover new books at random, if you find some thrill in interacting with text, if you want to be part of a team and a project, if you wish to contribute to web 2.0 without being a geek, or if you just do not mind giving a hand to what I believe is a true literary wonder of the world.

Inspired from a comment I left at Quilhill’s: I often find myself using an intellectually sloppy yet empirically efficient technique for grammar check. Essentially, I hesitate on idiomatic expressions a lot and sometimes I cannot find a proper entry in my dictionary or any online resource I know. I want to know about usage. For instance: do people say “to take up a challenge” or “to take on a challenge?”. It may be obvious to you but not to me (check this post), and I am sure everybody hesitates on that sort of things some day.

Instead of trying every possible dictionary entry (take, up, challenge), I do google-voting: [more]

Weetabix is my main breakfast diet, and has been for close to a quarter of a century, back to the times when my parents had to smuggle it illegally from England It has been my brothers’ too, and the result is: [more]

I recently saw The Meaning of Life for the umpteeth time, and could not resist sharing some of it:
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In the wake of Dorothy’s recent post about The Polysyllabic Spree in which she describes how Nick Hornby unfairly judges fiction writers who tirelessly seek the holy graal of perfect conciseness, [more]

I once heard actress Jodie Foster on a french radio show: her French was absolutely fluent, her accent was flawless, and yet I could tell right away that French was not her first language. [more]

Although a faithful participant to Lorelle’s blogging challenge, I was contemplating skipping the latest challenge, because I am really not that brilliant at tampering with Wordpress.

Your Blogging Challenge this week is to write a WordPress Tip. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be programming-code-from-hell technical, but it could if you are into such things.

And again, I finally realised that although they were slightly off-topic, I probably had original working habits that I might share. So, let us share.

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Ubiquitous acronyms

Acronyms are abbreviations made from the initial letters of a series of words. They sound a barbaric hacked sound. They look an ugly uppercase look. They mean a cryptic jargonic meaning. And they are taking over the world. They have already conquered most technological niches, from computers to genetics, from astrophysics to psychiatry, from oil-drilling to meteorology. Blessed are those who can avoid them on their workplace. Let me just quote a fragment of the acronymic gobbledygook that I have to read through on a daily basis: [more]

Who is my blogging persona ?

Lorelle on Wordpress, in her compelling blogging challenge, encourages us to give more details on who we are when blogging:

Who and what is your online blogging persona? Is it different from who you really are in life? How? I’ve been asking who the hell are you for a while now. Here’s your chance to tell us. Who are you, the blogger, when you blog?

At first, I thought: [more]