Friday 06/06/2025
I had moved my laundry day to Friday to clear room to go to that movie on Wednesday, so I started it early at 7, so as to leave room for a nice morning walk with Joanne. Back in plenty of time for the Line Dance class at 10:30.
I had put together a quick cheat sheet on my various relatives to prime Joanne for when we visit Dennis tomorrow. That led me to looking at the family photo album I created back in, I can hardly believe this, 2001. For some time it was online, and I could put it back online now. I should do that. Oh well.
But that led me to the shelf in the closet where I have paper copies of the autobiographies of my mother Cecil, my father Emil, and my sister Joyce. A couple years ago I scanned Emil’s autobiography and converted it to a searchable text file. It now dawns on me I could, maybe should? do the same for Cecil’s and Joyce’s.
I did a quick test today. At some point in the 90s, Cecil wrote a 10-page essay recounting her recollections of my childhood and the various problems they had raising me. I have an app, VueScan, which is a great scanner app for photos, but I knew it had OCR (optical character recognition) abilities. I used it to scan that 10-page essay and I was amazed how easy it went, and how accurate the OCR was. It made a PDF that was a perfect image of the document, but the actual text was in it also. I was able to copy and paste the text out of the PDF to a text file and check it over, there were almost no errors, except it got a little confused where Cecil had inserted hand-written notes. And fast. VueScan is one of the great apps if you have a scanner. So maybe I will do those other two books. It would take a few hours for each. Anybody interested in the files, if I do?
Anyway for the amusement of my relatives here is an embarrassing picture from my archives.
Christmas 1960. How many of these people can you name? Hint, I’m the dork in the middle.
Codgerville 