Not so wasted away... Coriolistic Anachronisms - A Vancouver Blog

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Random Entry: The good ol' days  
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Feb 2
   Vintage! This is a random post. The year was 2006...

"Les aventures d'un GO désorganisé" sur Google Book Search

Google is still constantly innovating. Not satisfied with being the number one search engine, they have launched many other projects and services, all of them as successful as the main Google is. Among these, their Gmail webmail which has become my one and only email, and the fantastic Google Earth providing worldwide satellite photo coverage through computer based software.

One of the newcomers is Google Books. Google has undertaken the gargantuesque task of scanning books and making them available to internet searches by titles, authors, publishers and... content! Yes, you read this right, content too. One can now do a Google Book Search for a specific line, paragraph or quote and be given a reference for the book, and in most cases a preview of the page containing the search terms!

Of course, this will probably take years to complete. And Google can only freely index the content of public domain books, for obvious copyright reasons. But if the publisher and/or author submit their book(s) and give their agreement, Google will index their work and make it available to searches, while restricting the previewing feature to a few pages.

That’s what I did for « Les aventures d’un GO désorganisé » and it was just recently indexed by Google, meaning that you can now go to Google Book Search and if you do a search for the expression « oeufs roses migrateurs de baleine », you will actually get a search result for the relevant page of the book!

Granted, the process isn’t quite perfect yet and some letters seem to get distorted by the scanning. But what an extraordinary start!

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2006-02-02 20:42 • Posted in Cool:

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We now go back to current chronological entries:
Random Entry: Cherry Blossoms - Part 2  
 Next: Serendipity | Previous: Fricassée de chanterelles à la vancouvançale - A spoof
Sep 9

Not so wasted away...

11 BC. Beautiful sunny day, prelude to fall, some trees having shyly begun turning red already. The wind is blowing steadily from the southwest, raising white caps on English Bay, shaking the relative summer heat off. The air smells of coffee, literally and metaphorically.

I’ve had Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville in my head all morning, God knows why. Marc and Danny, sipping on their 12 year old Flor de Caña, would roll in laughter if they knew - Vinny mumbling to himself in the streets of Vancouver, « Don’t know the reason, stayed here all season... » Not sure if I should be ashamed or amused, or both. But after so much water has flowed under foreign bridges, these songs I used to mock have taken place into the brightly colored picture of my Caribbean days. They bring up a sweet nostalgia. Those were the days. Buffet’s song are about nothing serious, about beach bums and the unbearable lightness of being. They speak of the eternal quest for a reason, quenched by a few drinks and re-triggered by a few more. They remind me of a lifestyle without a style, hypnotically regular, lacking shirts and shoes but filled with salty sun, with for only season one of hurricanes, for only calendar one set by the landing of small planes. A life splashed by the hilarious antagonistic stories of outsiders and locals, tourists and residents, them and us...

Back in the Little Cayman days, our two dive boats were called Havana Daydreaming and Banana Wind. Now I finally see why.

 

2007-09-09 10:36 • Posted in Schtroumpfissime:

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  • 1 - Anonymous says:

    « Nostalgia is about wanting to go back in time or in place.
    Fortunately it’s impossible.
    How awful the deception were we allowed to really do it.
    Times, places and people change, move on, and so do we.
    Pour le meilleur et pour le pire... ;-) »

    Date of comment: 2007-09-10 03:16 •

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