Got this message from Google Voice today:

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and received this handy transcription:

It’s not a matter and I want to make a single. But I think the rest of the not. If you’re not. You’re gonna.

Unfortunately, Google Voice didn’t recognize that the message had been left in Spanish, and so the message makes no sense. What’s really funny is that while it bears no relation to the sense of the message in Spanish as the Spanish speakers among you will recognize, Google Voice did a great job of making sense of the sounds assuming the speaker was speaking English!

I’ve been interested in Pompeii from an early age, ever since I first read about how the Roman town had been buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and that archaeologists were revealing it bit by bit just as it had been thousands of years ago. Images of the macabre body casts of the eruption’s victims were terrifying and compelling to me at the same time. The 1972 film Pink Floyd at Pompeii made a perfect soundtrack to my early investigations, and the images of the band set up in the otherwise empty ampitheatre were haunting.

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So for those of you who aren’t using Buzz (yet?) and in an attempt to keep stuff I write about in one place, I gathered up some of the posts I’ve made on Buzz for this story. I don’t know if I’ll keep using Buzz or not, and if I don’t I’d like to have a copy of this stuff somewhere. I use my personal website much like a Doogie Houser electronic journal while I use Facebook for sharing links and videos I find interesting, but how I might use Buzz is still kind of in flux. Things I write on my personal blog are automatically included as “notes” on Facebook, so folks I am connected to over there will be able to see the kind of things I’ve been posting over there. Since Buzz is integrated into gmail (where I spend a lot of time) and a lot less bloated with ads and other stupid app clutter, it seems to lend itself much better to serious conversations than facebook does so its possible that I’ll want to figure out some kind of automated method to integrate those conversations happening on Buzz back into my own site (I like to archive stuff I write so I can reference it later). Sounds like RSS would be the perfect solution but of course Google doesn’t make an RSS feed for my Buzz posts available… neither does Facebook – even though they both will happily use the technology themselves to suck in outside content.

The following posts are just my side of the conversation for posts I’ve made on Buzz since I started using it, to participate in the conversation fully – sign up and follow me there!
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It’s fairly common knowledge that Google has been scanning in (actually photographing) entire books, converting the images to text (OCR) and storing the digital text in a database for searching for the Google Books project. Google claimed about a year ago that by that time they had scanned in over 7 million titles at a cost of over $5 million dollars. (note: Google has taken steps to make it difficult or impossible to download or print portions of copyrighted material.) Today they announced that users can download a million titles that are in the public domain – books for which no copyright is in force.

They will be offering these titles in EPUB and PDF format. I’m not familiar with EPUB, but it appears to be an open format which allows the text to “flow” into whatever screen size you have. As a long time user of Plucker on the palm for ebook reading, I’m hoping it’s at least as cool as that open source project. This is a very exciting day! The only downside is that the texts are just OCR’d scans and they aren’t cleaned up at all. Hopefully folks like those that participate in the Gutenberg project will lend a hand to help get them fixed up.