I’m a Brooklyner, but I’ve been in San Francisco for a week or so and might be out here for the rest of the year.
Sitting in a kitchen, typing scraps of notes all day, mostly goofing off.
Right now I’m trying to make steps toward pulling a bootleg PDF of a book compiled from manuscript notes into a database that can be arranged and played with on the web. I’m going about it all wrong, and even typing this helps see that. I’ve been running OCR apps across a bootleg scan of Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”, re-typing (for fun?) some John Barth, and doing little bits to clean up some websites before the year ends.
Between my bravado to Justin about Infinite Jest and a new iPad mini, I restarted reading it the whole way through on a little screen for the first time. I usually skip around a text file version that appeared on the internet some number of years ago. As an epub on an ipad, with some half-baked footnote html… it hurts.
Basically all I’m doing all the time is thinking about how to turn books into data and how that might help someone sitting on a mountain far from the limitless fuel economy. Also, I like writing HTML.
My mapping/storytelling friends hang out on twitter, away from which I’ve just stepped. You’re catching me at an odd time. Hello.