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The first step
This page is what it is
I’ll start here. How did I get here? It’s a long story, fifty seven years long. In the “last is first” tradition of blogging I’ll only sketch for now what got me into starting this web log. To help my son D. in his research, I needed a scanner. Being an old software slave that I am, I’ve already been through “scanner hell” a couple of times before and now I’ve decided to do it right. My first step was to look around for the best OCR software. I read the hype, I checked with friends who are supposed to know about such things, I found it and I decided to buy it because "Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome." My next step was to look around for an actual scanner device able to run the software I chose and also be able to do the jobs I need done. I looked at prices ranging from $40 to $17000. None of the devices seemed right and I took my chances on ordering one from Amazon thinking that in the worst case I’ll just return it. Well, well, what do you know! It worked like a charm. Now I am the lucky owner of a working scanner. Since good software is hard to find (just like a good man, according to Flannery O'Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) I immediately took notice of my good luck and tried for some more. The same company that wrote the fine OCR software also offers a fine multilingual electronic dictionary. So now I am the proud owner of one. The dictionary site pointed me in the direction of a fine group of people that raised my hopes for mankind (I guess I should say “humanity” rather than “mankind” to avoid sexist language); more specifically I am talking about the sub-spices of Homo Sapiens that I would call Homo Reticulatus, by which I mean the web crawling variety. Even more specifically I mean a group of smart and sensitive people whose job it is to choose words all day long. Who do you think might that be, even in Well, without farther ado, I would like to express my joy and refreshing surprise at getting to know translators and interpreters. The site that I made my home page in Opera is this. It is the Association of Lingvo lexicographers. I already knew from Samuel Johnson that a lexicographer is "A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge..." Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) And I already knew from my father’s life that a translator and interpreter is a man to my liking so I wasn’t disappointed. The first name I bumped into was Pavel Palazhchenko. I long admired him since the first time I saw this bold man with a big moustache in action right next to Gorbachev. He was (and still is, I think) Gorbachev’s interpreter. The next thing I knew I was glued reading his forum. Today he brought up the word blog… I followed a few links, found Radio 8.0 and here I am. Why am I starting this blog? I hope to get the discipline of writing regularly out of this experience. And then who knows what will come out of my blog head?! "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
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