Where do I find the time?

[catsidhe]

Mim found The Muppet Show, first season collected. We watched it on the weekend. Yes, all of it.

Abbi, it turns out, loves the 'Muffin show!!', and spent much of the weekend turning to us and informing us "Muffin show! Animal!".

usuakari, tooticky, you will have to come over some time so we can all sit down and watch some.

(It may have to be next year, though. At current showing, we are double-booked every weekend until 2009 or so.)

---

I've been trying to sort out the various projects I am to some degree working on right now. It's not trivial.

The inter-relationships need a key to sort them out.


01: Printable indexed versions of the CELT Annals.

Status: getting there, slowly but surely.
The idea was to have versions of the Annals I could use in Heraldry meetings, with the names indexed by annal entry, so I could reference "Connchobhar macc Gabhair meic Albainn" as appearing under that spelling in the annal for 1247 in the Annals of Tigernach, for example.
Requisite subtasks:

• SGML -> LaTeX translation program (02)
  
• Appropriate fonts (specifically for Gaelic) (03)

There are example outputs here [pdf of an entire annal, 1.8Mb, original file here] and here [pdf of an example section, 180kb].
I've since discovered that at least one annal hasn't marked the names, so the indexing won't happen there. feh.

02: SGML -> LaTeX translation program

After a couple of false starts, I've made good progress on this. At least the current version can take a given CELT document and produce a fair LaTeX document at the end. There are two main parts to this effort:

• Perl SGML Parsing Engine (02a)
  
• Perl SGML tree translation Engine (02b)

02a: Perl SGML Parsing Engine

This required that I dive into Perl much deeper than most people ever need to. My parsing engine is object-oriented, modular, extendible, all in all vastly superior to the crawling tentacles of HTML::Tree et al.

02b: Perl SGML tree translation Engine

This required that I write a language ab initio to describe tree->flat filtering, and be able to parse that. I based it vaguely on LISP, with options on Perl, HTML and cthuluian monstrosity. An example is:

<rule><tag>HI</tag>
<rulecode>
    (SET $OPEN (IF (EXISTS $ATTR{id}))
        (CAT "\emph{(" (GET $ATTR{id}) ") ")
        "\emph{" )
    (SET $CLOSE "}")
</rulecode></rule>

which turns '<hi>test</hi>' into '\emph{test}', and '<hi id="001">test</hi>' into '\emph{(001) test}'. It is not as easy as it looks.
Status: well advanced, although I keep wondering if the next feature I want to add will require re-writing the whole damn thing.

03: Metafont expansion of the eiad font family.

Status: well developed. I have added extra letters jkvwxyz, JKVWZ, ligatures for 'ar', 'rr', 'ea' and 'Ea' (e caudata). Changed the encoding around so that even if the correct encoding is not used, T1 encoding will work for most letters. (That is, if the xeiad font is set without setting the appropriate encoding, so long as T1 is in use, \'a still gets á.) Added italic shapes for some letters, as opposed to standard eiad, which only impliments slanted, and calls it italic. Made sure that my code works in upright and italic, serif, sans and teletype faces, normal, bold, expanded bold weights.
To do: uppercase X, Y still to be done. Ææ, Þþ, Ðð to be added. Additional code in the revised 1998 version of eiad to be folded in, including a smallcaps face (for serif, sans, tt families, for all of upright, slanted, italic shapes and normal, bold weights).
Examples here [pdf] and here.

04: Translating Beowulf vs Grendel from Old English into Modern

(remember this, tooticky?) I've made good progress on this, and hope to post it relatively soon (in a month or so?) To do this, of course, I have had to...

05: Learn Old English

OE is not an easy language to learn, for several reasons. One of those is false familiarity. You'll see a word like 'þat' ("that") or 'þem' ("them") or 'hwam' ("whom"), and think you know what it means or to whom it refers, but it may not mean what you think it means, or refer to who you think it does. Unless it does. As well, spelling in OE manuscripts changes depending on where and when it was written, so a word might be spelled with 'a', 'æ', 'e' or 'ea', it might have 'ge-' in front or not, 'i' and 'y' might be interchangeable, except when they aren't, and long vowels aren't marked, making disambiguation between, eg, 'god' ("God") and 'god' ('gód' "good") problematic at times. Studying OE has lead naturally to...

06: Learning Midde English

Take everything I said for OE, and repeat it here. Now common words (like "take") appeared widely in English only later, so depending on where and when a text was written you might find 'takest' or 'nimmþ'. 'Y' and 'i' are interchangeable, the pronunciation of 'g' and 'c' can be seemingly random, final '-e' could be silent, a schwa, or either in the same line if scansion demands it, words could have completely changed meaning in the intervening time (like 'cheer' (originally "outward composure"), 'sad' (originally "settled, determined"), 'meat' (originally "any foodstuff")).

As well, there is Learning Latin, Calligraphy/Illumination, Ritual Magick, and the history of R.M., historical and comparative theology, dabbling in politics, oh, and somewhere in there I have a full-time job and two small children.

Comments

[kitling.livejournal.com]

I'm going to buy the dvd's :)

This means however that I'll have the entire Time Life collection of Best of Muppet Show on video looking for a new home...

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Mim found it in Kmart, with a different cover than Amazon show.

If you get it, watch it with the trivia track turned on: it gives all the names, points out where characters appear for the first time, when they will come back, when and why they change, who operates them, trivia about the guests (and what they have done since the Muppets), and keeps a running count of Miss Piggy's karate chops (kicks don't count).

Your diary

[(Anonymous)]

I hope you will have time to see your mother when I visit after Christmas!! I'm glad you now have The Muppets, it was a tradition to watch them when you were little.