Thursday, February 19, 2009

My scanner

If I had a scanner I'd scanner in the morning.
I'd scanner in the evening all over this land.

But to do OCR you need a good picture, otherwise the recognition program takes a Norwegian text and turns it into a prehistoric Cyrillic document. The free google OCR hasn't been trained for Norwegian yet. www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm


I have a book about the early dwellers of Volda, Norway; the town my mother came from. As the document is OCR'ed there are a few difficulties because of my primitive scanning techniques. Often I get the error message, "uncertain character", how true. One of the characters from way back had a wife who was blind, seems their one daughter was blind too; anyway he must have gotten fed up with the wife because one day he rowed her out onto a remote point off the coast and just left her there. Lucky she could shout and holler, lucky sound carries well across water. Some kind soul rowed out to rescue her.

Scanning out love between great uncles and their cousins all a-aa-ll over this land.

2 comments:

Anita said...

well once upon a time you had a scanner... with busted glass and all. That's quite a contraption you've got set up there.
That was some relation... yikes.
And cool closing line. You're hired.

Ethel said...

you start talking computers and stuff and i get rapidly lost..btw..how do you know kim and ashi? i met them in 1997..can give you the story if you want. hope they are fine!