Shell

DAISY pilot

CNIB has released a report on a pilot project they've been running with HRDC to determine the efficacy of DAISY digital talking books (aussi en français). I have no idea if anyone else will find it interesting, but I like how it supports what we've been doing and makes it seem worthwhile. Also, it mentions one of the projects I helped narrate (Actex actuarial study manuals).

One thing that I was glad to read was the comment that the DAISY format could make it easier for blind and visually impaired people to flip through a book than for sighted people. This ties into ideas I (and other people) have had about promoting DAISY as a general-audience audiobook format. Currently the only thing really holding back sighted people from using DAISY already is the fact that nearly all existing DAISY format books were made for free libraries for the blind. Thus, they aren't distributable to the population at large since they were produced under exemptions in copyright law specifically for materials for the blind and visually impaired.

You can learn more about the DAISY standards on the DAISY Consortium's web site.

Kanukmusik

I bought some CDs on Friday. Great Big Sea's all-trad The Hard and the Easy, Great Lake Swimmers' self-titled album, and Fembot's The City.

The last two because I heard interesting songs on CIUT while walking to the Subway, and the first because of an accident of alphabetic sorting.

Right now I've hit the Fembots' song that I caught, Demolition Waltz, which is serious goodness.

The Great Big Sea album is awesome. It comes with a bonus DVD of them singing most of the same songs over again, only in the wrong key!

Great Lake Swimmers seems like mostly a write-off, except for i will never see the sun. I'm such a TTC junkie I may keep the album just for that one song.

Riverdale

Went down to Riverdale today to pick up some coffee and take some pictures. I took this shot from Riverdale Park East of a TTC streetcar with the Holy Eucharist Ukranian Catholic Church in the background.

Killer of trees

At work, they had a fundraiser, selling the print copies of books we'd recorded in the studios. The books are marked up something fierce, and some have their spines chopped off, so they were going for $1 apiece, all proceeds to the United Way.

So, since they were only a dollar, I picked up a bunch that I might not have ordinarily bought:

• Judith Cowan, Gambler's Fallacy. Short stories about life in Trois-Rivières, Québec. The Porcupine's Quill, 2001.


• Keath Fraser, The Voice Gallery: Travels with a Glass Throat. Fraser has a rare neurochemical disorder that has rendered him unable to speak. The book is about his travels finding other people who have lost their voices. Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002.


• Kenneth J. Harvey, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe. A small Newfoundland outport comes down with a mysterious illness that makes them unable to breathe automatically—breathing is a conscious act. Raincoast Books, 2003.


• Dennis Lee, un. A collection of fractured poems. I've already cracked this one open and browsed, and they read rather like Dissociated Press. Anansi, 2003.


• Caitlin Sweet, A Telling of Stars. Sort of generic-looking fantasy. I'll see how it goes. Penguin, 2003.


• Dianne Warren, A Reckless Moon. Short stories about people being reckless. Raincoast Books, 2002.

Add to this Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and English as She is Spoke, which I picked up Monday, plus the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, plus a textbook on digital signal processing, plus the Miles Vorkosigan books that Dad wants to press on me, and I've got my reading cut out for me for the next several months.