Baby Chicks and Hunters

Baby chicks came in last week and they are so cute. We got Araucanas/Americanas (they lay colored eggs) and brown leghorns for eggs and a few Buff Orpington roosters to fill out the order. Yes, it's late in the season, but the idea was to let them grow over the winter and then they would be ready to start laying in the spring. Now to build a chicken coop.

The girls went deer hunting this weekend. The fact that they didn't get anything didn't keep them from having fun. Ashley wouldn't clown with them, so the picture is one girl short.

Historical Census Browser

The University of Virginia Library has developed a historical census browser that lets the user pull out statistical information found on the US Census from 1790 to 1960 down to the county level.

It will pull up multiple statistics, for example the total population in a location and the number of individuals attending school to allow users to compare statistics. It will pull the statistics over a period of years for comparison. Then it will map the results for you.

The statistics cover topics such as ethnicity, literacy in different ethnic groups and ages, farm and home ownership among different ethnic groups, employment, housing and more depending on the census year.

What you won't find are the names of individuals on the census, this browser is strictly for demographic information and it is outstanding for that type of information.

Harry the Hamster

Sometimes I feel like Harry going round and round in his wheel all night and getting nowhere.

And then sometimes my kids do something so awesome that it just makes me stop that wheel and cry.

Living 12 miles from town and being carless makes me feel trapped and desperate. Not a good feeling to have when car shopping. That said, if anyone has a good, used, car that gets good gas mileage to sell, come see me. Desperate buyers are good for the seller, right?

In the middle of worrying about that and everything else, last night my youngest daughter left a note on my bed. On the top it said "Do Not Worry." Below that she had copied the entire text of Matthew 6:25-34.

Fact or Fiction - EKU Trivia

One major project down only a dozen more to go.

The "Fact or Fiction: Test your EKU Knowledge" slide show has been uploaded to slideshare.net for those of you who really wanted to see it. In Powerpoint there were links to external information and a couple film clips that no longer work.

Maybe I can figure out how to upload the actual presentation with all the bells and whistles.

Fact Or Fiction

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

make lemonade. Ok, that's all fine and good, but just what are you supposed to do with a car that looks like this?

Unfortunately, Melissa has been driving the car while I've been carpooling and apparently it really isn't cool to be a high school senior and ride the bus to school. She is more upset than I am that we are temporarily carless.

All I can say is thank goodness that when I was trying to pare down insurance costs, I didn't drop the comprehensive. And a special thanks to the Good Samaratin who made a u-turn to help with his fire extinguisher.

Faith In Action

Over the weekend I was able to see my old pastor, Tiger Pennington, at a fundraiser for GraceNow and HealthNow, a local foodbank and health care center.

His message was basically "Faith in action is a response to grace."

Isn't it funny that you don't realize how much you miss someone until you see them again?

We Can Do OCR!

Yesterday afternoon I installed the new Abbyy FineReader software that just came in.

Installation was a breeze and the software is very intuitive to start using. Scanning the first document was simple. I didn't even have to look at the manual to scan or edit the text. It did get a bit more complicated when the document was saved, because there are so many options available.

The end result that I wanted was a .pdf document that looked like the original that, but that had a text layer underneath which allowed the user to search the document. After several tries and reading the manual (imagine that) here is the end result.

To get a document that looks like the original scan select 'keep original image size,' 'text under page image' and 'enable tagged pdf'.'

Some things to note. FineReader automatically rotated the landscape photograph on page 8, but it couldn't read the text that was sideways in the table on page 16. To get that section of text readable I think it would take a lot of extra effort.

I was impressed with the accuracy of the OCR and the ease of use. So now we enter another phase of digitization.