helen-louise's journal

I have a ton of documents to scan before I go. Academic papers that I need to take with me and would prefer to carry in my computer rather than as heavy bundles of paper. So far, my automatic document feeder is not working and only scanning half the pages. Why does it do this? WHY? Do I need to sacrifice a chicken to the printer or something?

And the OCRing doesn't seem to have worked terribly well, e.g.:
Unterberger,U., Hofibcrgcr, R., Gelpi. E., Flicker, H., Budka, B., & Voigtlander, T. (2006). Endoplasmic reticulum stress features arc prominent in Alzheimer disease but not in prion diseases ill vivo. .Journal or Nellropatholo,,,ry alld E>(perimental Neur%gy, 65, 348·-357.

Other journal titles include:
* Biochemical and Biophysical Research COI1lIllUllications
* . .fournal 4N'eurochemistl)'
* A1alecular Biology of the Cell
* Gelles & Developlllent
* 7i'cnds in Molecular Medicine
* Cellular and :l1oleeular LUi! Sciences"
* Journal of eel/Biology

I didn't even know I'd READ the Journal of Eel Biology!

Journal titles are worst affected because the OCR program can't cope with italics, but paper titles get mangled too. "Extensive involvement of autophagy in Alzheimer disease: An il11l11uno-clectron microscopy study." !111!

Think I'll try saving the PDF as Image Over Text instead of Text Over Image. That is, as soon as my printer stops crashing!

I have spent a fair bit of time this week trying to listen to the recordings of lectures that I missed last week.

By a slightly complicated route, the government has given me stuff for being disabled, and this includes a digital voice recorder. The idea is that I take it to college to record my lectures, to help with studying: like for example, if I space out during the lecture and miss something important. And afterwards I can read over the notes I've made while listening to the recording, in an attempt to get the information into my brain better. It seems pretty helpful, and I only wish I'd had the recorder when I started the course instead of not getting it until February. (Apparently the Disabled Students' Allowance assessment and funding procedure is four months of stress followed by a few days excitement as the stuff arrives, followed by frantic struggling to try to get yourself back to the level of understanding you should have been in if you'd had all the support in place the first time round :/ )

When I realised I wasn't going to be able to physically get to college, I emailed my lovely personal tutor P and asked if he'd mind recording his lecture for me. And he was happy not only to help with that, but also to liaise with Howard who teaches on Wednesday nights. So I sent a furry wuzzie up to college with the recorder, and between the three of them, I have a virtually complete copy of everything I missed. However, the DVR picks up all sounds and seems to favour things like paper rustling, overhead projector whirring, and air conditioning over the human voice, even though I can't imagine anyone wanting to record any of those noises. Despite using both the low cut filter (which is supposed to remove low frequency machine noise) and the playback noise filter, there's still an awful lot of distracting extra sound. And because the playback noise filter cuts out some human voice frequencies along with the noise, the speaker sounds somewhat robotic and some words are inaudible.

So, if my lecture recordings are to be believed, at one point last Tuesday an elephant came into the room mid-lecture and trumpeted. While, bizarrely, I get to hear other students whispering to each other without really being able to hear what they're saying. It's a bit spooky, but still not as weird as when the air conditioning starts "singing" - which is like the stereotypical "ooo eee" ghost noise from cartoons. And I swear that in the middle of a lecture about the citric acid cycle, Calvin cycle and photosynthesis, P said "I don't want to dwell on individual steps except the first one, which kicks off the Heatran cycle." No... he can't ACTUALLY be teaching us biochemistry of a Pokemon, can he?

I am not having fun with technological devices today.

My printer is being evil and pestilent. I was trying to print a file double-sided by printing first all the odd numbered pages, in reverse order, then all the even numbered pages, in normal order. However, for reasons known entirely unto itself, the pestilent device decided to randomly spew forth some of the even numbered pages as they were printing. Thus I have page 34 on the back on page 43 and other such delights of sadorandom numbering. Joy.

Then, after wasting about 30 or so sheets of paper, it decided to run out of ink. ( More incoherent moaning. )

And I got so stressed that while I remembered to plug my minidisc player into the charger and remembered to switch on the CD player, I didn't remember to connect the two together with the optical cable. So I have not even been successful in copying this CD I want to listen to on the move tomorrow. ARGH!! I tell you, if it wasn't for the fact this is approximately the most mellow music I own, I would be murderous by now.