Conversion

Thursday, Feb. 03, 2011 - 5:37 a.m.

John took two days off -- one for me and one for him.

He's back at work today, though!

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I'm doing a bunch of research about airports and luggage theft and I'm finding that LAX is the worst offender.

Subsequently, I'm also doing a bunch of research about how to pack so as to avoid problems.

I'm also looking at options for white noise sounds to put on the iPod so I can put the device on repeat and cram the buds in my ears and try and sleep.

Hopefully April's trip will be minimally invasive on all levels.

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Had something of a victory last night with an older Mac file.

No, not a file of mine. Paul Kidd had the complete text of his novel A Whisper Of Wings in MacWrite format -- which was unintelligible on his current borrowed Windows platform -- and had been planning to ask his housemate to attempt a text conversion so he could work on it in MS Word.

I asked him to send me the files to see if I could do anything from here.

It turns out that the OSX version of MS Word 2004 has a combooberator to open and extract text from some kinds of old Mac files.

I opened the files, and saved the files as Word files after I chose the option 'Retrieve Text', which meant the formatting was kind of compromised -- but Paul didn't have a problem with this aspect just as long as he could actually access the words themselves. Since he's the one that wrote it, he remembered where everything was supposed to go, formatwise. He went through and found where the italics were supposed to have been and fixed the widows and orphans and is adapting the novel's footnotes to be Kindle-friendly.

Yep, that's right. Until the books come back into conventional print, Paul Kidd will soon be publishing most of his novels on Kindle.

I wish him every bit of luck with this new-to-him form of publishing.

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Finally, happy birthday to Old Buddy Dave.

OBDave? I am glad you are still having birthdays. Love ya lots!

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All right, that's it. Have a good day.

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