Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

Amy emailed me this morning that Sarah Palin was coming to our town today. Regardless of her politics, there is something about a woman running for vice president, who hunts and fishes, and was a former beauty queen, which pushes some buttons in my male "joe sixpack" psyche. Amy seems to tolerate my fascination with Sarah Palin, and I guess by emailing me about the event, she also indulges me.

I brought a camera with me, and had visions of getting a photo of Gov. Palin and me together. The reality turned out to be me standing in the cold rain for an hour elbowing a bunch of cold, wet conservatives for a good view. She spent most of the visit indoors, but came out to greet the crowd briefly before leaving. Disappointingly, the best pics I got were some blurry photos of her waving as her bus passed by.

Mostly Unabridged

Finally completed a version of the book which contains most of the blog, including comments. Most of what was deleted, was for space. With all the pictures and formatting, it can be tough to get everything right without orphaned pictures and lots of blank wasted space. But I'm pretty pleased with the result. You can read it here.

I was able to get it all in under 400 pages. Grampa suggests that this is too long for a book, even if a lot of it is pictures. I'm going to start work on a "tightened up" version of the book. I'd like to get it down closer to 300 pages, while getting rid of extraneous stuff and making it more readable.

If anyone has specific suggestions of stuff to cut, or more general advice on how to edit the book, I'd love to hear it.

In other news, Kyle and Maryanne left Portsmouth, VA heading south on the ICW. I'm not sure where their destination is. But I'm pretty jealous that I'm not going with them.

Amy-Cuda

I'm thinking about getting this for xmas as a present for Amy.

Unabridged

Work on a version of a book including comments, is coming along swimmingly. The first version of the book I mostly copy & pasted, and formatted by hand. For this version, I've mostly automated the process. I wrote the perl script below to download the blog and strip a lot of the html formatting from the text.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;

open INFILE, "bloglinks.txt";
@lines = <INFILE>;
close INFILE;


foreach $line (@lines)
{
  if ($line =~ /(http.+html)"/){unshift @urls, $1;}
}

open OF, ">blogcontent.txt";

foreach $url (@urls)
{
  $on = 0;
  my $content = get $url;
  @content = split(/\n/, $content);
  foreach $content1 (@content)
  {
    if ($content1 =~ /Post a Comment/){$on = 0}
    if ($on == 1)
    {
      $content1 =~ s/<br \/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<br\/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<BR \/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<BR\/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<\/h3>/(-\/B-)/;
      $content1 =~ s/<p.*?>/\n\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<span style="font-style:italic;">/(-I-)/;
      $content1 =~ s/<.*?>//g;
      $content1 =~ s/.+, 200.+M/\n\n/;
      $content1 =~ s/(comments:)/$1\n\n/;
      $content1 =~ s/^ +$//;
      $content1 =~ s/<dd class='comment-footer'>/\n\n/;
      print OF $content1;
    }
    if ($content1 =~ /<h3 class='post-title entry-title'>/)
    {
      $on = 1;
      print OF "(-B-)";
    }
  }
}    
close OF;

Also, I've refamiliarized myself with regular expressions. Regular expressions are a really powerful tool for parsing texts. I use them often when programming, but they would be really useful to anyone who had to do large scale editing and formatting of texts.

Not sure if the perl script would be of use to anyone else. If there were a demand from people who wanted to download their blog to their computer, I could probably place the script on my server and hook it up to the web to automate the process for others.

I should have a pdf of the unabridged book completed sometime next week. So far with text only, no pictures and little formatting, the book is about 300 pages. When done, I'm guessing it will be 500 some pages. If that's the case, it should cost about $20 including shipping.

So far eight copies of the book have been sold. At first I assumed that maybe grampa had bought a bunch of copies to give to friends, but additional copies of the book have been ordered. So maybe Grampa and I don't account for all the orders. If you ordered a book, thanks! Please let me know what you think of it (including any corrections/typos).

And wish the Admiral and me luck. We're running in a 5k tomorrow. I haven't run in a road race in years, but I've been working out daily at the college gym. Hopefully I'll have a good time.

Book Praise

Provocative, erudite and entertaining. What makes this book so
important is its honesty and courage. - Flipper, Dolphin Life and Times Magazine

Engrossing. Cap'n Scott is at the top of his writing game here.
Distills an enormous amount of information into descriptions
both portable and intriguing. - Bent Anchor Daily

Serious, gracefully written, and at the same time, as gripping as a
thriller - Ariel, Mermaid Monthly

Rich in detail... I have not stopped thinking and talking about this
book since I finished reading it. - Rusty Wench Magazine

A work of genius... marvelous to read. - Bubba Gump, Shrimpers
Quarterly

Cap'n Scott has a strong claim to being the best sailing writer
now working in the North Atlantic. Captain's Blog is a marvel. -
Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirate's Booty Blog

One of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary
sailing... A wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written
and deeply felt. - Flotsam and Jetsam Daily

The Captain has captured our times like a bug in amber. -
Shamu, Whale Tail Review

Book Tour

I ordered a copy of my book last week and it arrived on Monday. I'm pretty impressed. I had my doubts that something produced on my computer and printed by some dot com internet company would be of very high quality, but it is. My vanity book is virtually indistinguishable from a "real" book. Best of all, it cost $9 + $4 shipping = $13. It's a little mind blowingly cool.

I was concerned that the pictures wouldn't look good. There are a lot of them, and obviously aren't as impressive in black and white print, as they are in full color on a computer screen. But they look fine in print.

I used Open Office word processor to edit the book and produce the PDF for printing. I had some difficulty with Open Office, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with some of the advanced formatting commands. It took me awhile before I found Lulu's templates which set a lot of the formatting for me.

I found the Lulu publishing website pretty straight forward and easy to use. I made some errors, mostly due to this being my first book. But I'm definitely going to use Lulu again and would recommend it highly to anyone who's thought of writing a book. I'm just amazed that I have such a professional looking product in my hands, and that it was so cheap and relatively easy to produce.

Book preview and ordering is here. If you are someone who contributed regularly to the blog, I'd like to give you a signed copy of the book as thanks for all the emotional support during my trip. Same goes for all the folks who gave me tangible aid through the trip. The gift is a little self serving. Sorry. And it hardly matches the generosity of say, someone who gave me his old rudder cages after mine were destroyed.

Also, because the abridged version of the blog turned out so well, I'm going to start work on a version which includes blog comments. And of course, my publicist is busy scheduling my book tour!