I don’t know how you are handling the week. I am not doing that well. I am challenged by another mass shooting by some whack-job, the fact that our Armed Forces are actually should be called the Dis-armed Forces, and that the lead story about the massacre in the NY Times is about the concern of a local Imam that his flock will be subject to revenge attacks by outraged gun-toting Chattanoogans.

Or that we are making deals that undermine the Non-proliferation Treaty while providing de facto air support to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, after having armed ISIS out of the arsenal of Qaddafi’s Libya.

Not to mention that a major Woman’s Health organization supported in part by our tax dollars is in the business of selling- for profit- things that I can’t even bring myself to type.

And typing is another problem.

I have a mound of original source documents that I have whined about before. I don’t type that well, as some astute readers have noted before. I have a new, bouncier keyboard and it does all sorts of interesting things seemingly all by itself. I did not want to spend the day laboriously pecking away, and thus applied my sophisticated cyber skills to finding a solution to the problem.

Bulk scanning of paper documents is a familiar trick of the trade. When Secretary Clinton turned over some of her official e-mail to the State Department, she took pains to print them on paper, rather than just providing the existing electronic copies. That leaves the onus of re-canning them back into digital form so the archive can be easily search for key words and that sort of thing, and that was part of my challenge.

There are all kinds of programs to permit documents to be scanned into text format. I did my due diligence and searched for the best rated program and sent the company some money for the application. The copies of the documents I had were smudged, and reproductions of reproductions. When I scanned them, they came out something like this:

That was clearly not going to be a satisfactory solution. I have recreated documents that are semi-legible from old newspapers- that is where Great Great Uncle Patrick’s story came from- but it is a tedious process, and being a modern American, my attention span rarely lasts the news cycle.

I put my thinking cap on, with that particular day was a Navy ball-cap emblazoned with an embroidered iguana and the block letters “Guantanamo Bay Cuba.”

A few years ago I had experimented with voice recording capabilities with the idea of doing my own podcasts. Detailed research managed to blow through the discretionary time available in the morning to actually generate a story, but I did find a program that would transcribe my audio track to a text file. You know, of course how I managed to waste my time. I created an audio file in MPEG 4 format. That loaded just fine in the translation program, but then would not do anything. I had been prepared to watch in amazement as my voice was translated into perfect prose. I dreamed about doing the daily story in stream of consciousness- not that it isn’t- each morning, saving time and energy. Instead, I found that there was a “dictation” button, and I was able to press it and then read directly into the microphone on the computer.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. I am attaching the file, just in case you want to hear what it really said – listen here. This was the version that came out when it was dictated:

March 8, 1862.

Lay up on the Wheelhouse to watch the steamboats moving around me today. We cannot send any more letters home because the officers do not want that in service today Sunday turkeys on Shore after we tied up on the West bank of the Hill beautiful small stones to make pipe the River Wild miles to the Memphis & Charleston railroad bridge burned by the rebels General Sherman the country looks better in the freezer open all about 1 o’clock we started up the river had a steam Calliope aboard the fastest in the fleet had a race with a Glendale before that I thought our Quartermaster could swear by the captain of the balls you can you swore at the mad because I wanted to do was started again this morning by Karen Clark Sheard we stop for what county am Isles Pub Clifton what is your old house Independence sugar and an egg. Stopped at Savannah. Savannah nice place, nice day. I came back to the game hate it and went to bed on the 12th when is your with Bill route we went to town but could find nothing good answers to those so we came back in the afternoon I thought that all night in the night awakened by loud noise and found on getting up a soldier out of one of those Zouave regiments had fallen overboard close to the and whatever boys caught him he was pretty bad at this morning expecting it afternoon in Dragon form….I was going out the Pittsburg Landing after some bread this afternoon was going over to battery A, 1st Ohio they call me back you called me James Taylorcan can Seattle trees and scrub all around about 4 miles from the Tennessee River 1862 it was want boys route for inspection stations that have Corned Beef Pork Belly molasses potatoes and flower was told by adjutant Ross and we close by for you might walk in a hurry for Worse school this morning rain hard last night was reviewed by General Grant car made in the office copy some words for Ross soon after that.

I have no idea what it means, either. But I do know, that after attempting to type it and read it twice, I am now perhaps the world’s foremost authority on the month of March, 1862, in Company K of the 72nd Volunteer Infantry. I guess I can thank technology for that.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303