“When can I start giving Stanza fat wads of cash?” I hear you asking over your sad cup of cold coffee contained in that overpriced pottery mug you bought from your local art gallery. Never fear! We have some new fancy double-walled Stanza mugs for you to obtain through donation. Taylor and his new wife have been shipping them out as donations come in.
If you’ve studied your Mennonite history, you know that certain Mennonites left Holland in the sixteenth century to go to the kingdom of Poland to flee religious persecution. Because these Hollanders were good at draining swamps, they were given swampland in the Vistula Delta. So these Mennonites, these dyke-builders, went about this task with Mennonite ferocity and vigor. Soon, the swampland was turned into productive farmland that was the envy of the Prussian locals. We could go on with the story to Ukraine, but that’s where we’ll stop for now.
So, like these Mennonites who had to deal with the swampland they got when they first showed up in Poland, Kirby has been trudging through the swamp that is the admin panel. I’ve never actually trudged through a swamp before, but I imagine that it’s very slow going. So, that’s what’s been happening. I, as the primary programmer of said swamp, can say these mean, nasty, and disease-ridden things about this swamp. There is currently a lot of jank and not a lot of time to fix it. The end product is that entering songs is very slow going.
So, the Stanza government has gotten tired of the swamp, and we are hoping our developers, like the Mennonites in Poland, will drain the swamp and make our admin panel the envy of our rivals—whoever they are. One of the targets of this project is to make entering songs easier and faster for our song entry sweatshop in northeast Ohio.
Speaking of song entry, we now have over FIVE HUNDRED songs (read: five-hundred one) in our Stanza collection. So, that’s a going thing, I guess. Our song entry people have asked for faster ways to enter songs, and our research bureau is contemplating various methods for quickening the pace.
One such method involves parsing (fancy programmer jargon for “reading”) the PDF files for the information about the song contained in the PDF file. If you know anything about PDFs, you know that the company who invented this file format also invented the PSD file format. So, with that said, I would like to quote a phenomenal quote from an amazingly angry programmer who had to work with the PSD file format, with some paraphrasing, of course. “Trying to get data out of a [song PDF] file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday.”1
You would think that since you can read a PDF file with your eyes would mean that your computer could read the same PDF file with its eyes. The first thing to remember is that computers don’t have eyes. The second thing to remember is that the programs that generate song PDFs tend to be like that “eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday.” So, that’s not quite so straightforward. And that’s not even getting into the PDFs that only contain images of text, and not actual text.
I can also hear you asking, “well, yes, that’s a great diversion, and very funny thing about shark attacks and all, but what about the app?” The good news is that we have an actual functioning prototype that at least one person has used successfully at least once. So that’s pretty cool. If I was a videographer, I would show you more aptly how I feel about this. It would involve some kind of unidentified screaming object yelling “IT WORKS!” over and over again while jumping up and down on a table.
Long story short is that we are making some progress, albeit more slowly than we would like. So, get your sad little nose out of your overpriced pottery mug and head on over to our Donate page where you can get an overpriced amber glass double-walled not-pottery mug to put your sad little nose in instead. Or, since it’s almost Christmas—I heard some carols in Walmart earlier this week—go ahead and donate so that someone else can stick their sad little nose in a fancy glass mug.
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