Wednesday 01/21/2026
First thing was a hike with Joanne and Martha. Joanne suggested walking the residential area of the Stanford campus. I had never been in those parts, the area on the West side of the campus which has some steep little hills and some huge old houses among trees. We put in a couple of miles and got back around 10.
Which was convenient, I could change shoes and drive myself down to the Museum for the opening of the new Volunteer Lounge. Here is the gathering of geeks before the grand opening.
Janelle, volunteer coordinator, cut an actual ribbon to let about 1/4 of that crowd at a time into quite a small room, say 10×20, but it contains a table and a coffee machine and the library of reference books and demonstration objects. It was pretty much a non-event.
Back home I was feeling pooped and spent most of the afternoon reading and nodding off. I did satisfy my intellectual curiosity on one point. I’ve been thinking about the Project Gutenberg proofreaders, the volunteers who pick off the scanning errors from books being converted to P.G. distribution. Back in the early 20-teens I put in many hours on that site and wrote some software for it. Recently I’ve been wondering if anybody had started trying to apply AI to that work. I spent some time reviewing my own code, then searching the forums at that site, and yes, there have been some experiments along that line. But nothing I want to get into any further. Which is good to know.
Codgerville 