What happened to my evening?! It sort of disappeared!
First I had to deinstall Office XP from my PC, then install Office 2007. Then Microsoft wanted to download some updates — about 1Gb of them! I did some, and waited and waited, and then decided the rest could wait.
Then I had to scan a few pages of Iturbe’s edition of the Arabic version of a Coptic catena containing fragments of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems. The Arabic is much more complete than the Coptic original, you see. The translators of the Coptic wanted to see some more. So I did that, and then uploaded the new PDF. It took a while at 600 dpi, which is more than I would usually use. But Arabic has all these little letters, distinguished only by dots. Not much choice, but high resolution really.
Then a correspondant has sent me a sample of a translation of sermon by Severian of Gabala. It’s a little awkward, and English is not his first language. Bang that over to a reviewer. Then the reviewer comes back to say that three sentences isn’t really long enough — true — and so I write again for some more.
Meanwhile the same chap turns out to be a Severian enthusiast, who has translated one of Severian’s sermons extant in Armenian, in a publication to which I have no access. This is really interesting. But he also asks if I have the Savile edition of Chrysostom which contains some otherwise unpublished sermons. Well I do; but in PDF’s which are a Gigabyte in size. How to upload those?
And so on it goes. And somehow, there’s no more time, and the uploads are still going on, and I need to go to bed!
Haha take a deep breath my friend… you still accomplish more in an afternoon than most people I’ve met 😛
As for large document storage, have you considered some manner of private FTP or Torrent Storage? You could set up a NAS with a Firewire or USB enclosure and just move stuff onto it as needed and point your translators to it.
DynDNS.com, and an open port on your network could do nicely on a budget.
Oh! And another random toy for your parsing/translations activities:
http://www.textanalysis.com/
They’ve made their Development Environment for Natural Language Processing available for free, it may or may not come in handy for you.
Thanks for the suggestions. Sadly I don’t have a broadband connection that would support some network-attached storage. It’s an ADSL connection, which means upload is slow, and anyway it will just go down after a couple of hours. But thanks for the tips; maybe when we get better internet access!