Oh. My. God.

 

I didn’t do this. Some complete stranger(s) did. I just received an email from an old friend who might be working with me again on some new/old projects. We were touching base after the school year at Pomfret School where he is a Department head and has been understandably busy for many months. In his response to my email, he wrote me this:

“Hi, Robert, I was just thinking of you... I was checking my non-Pomfret gmail, an address I have relegated to torrents of spam, basically ignored, and I found a new email from Reiji Kitsuoka, signed Elphkun. Do you know about this? They linked to their project here: https://theboomerbible.online/

I had no idea! I haven't had a lot of time in the last couple of days, but it seems that they cracked the ICR following functionality, where you can click through and then just follow the links all the way down the line. Wow! They also said they updated the Table of Harrier Dates to work now and far in the future. 

I guess I should ask: is this you? Are they in touch with you? If not, should they be?”

It is unbelievable. A masterpiece of coding and the product of a ton of meticulous work. It breaks the code on the Intercolumn Reference. You can now toggle to the exact lines of verse referenced in the ICR, as well as the context in which it appears. (It can’t do this yet, but that’s for some future PhD. dissertation)  It is also the complete book, including what TheBoomerBible.com did not, including the both prefaces, the epistle Dedicatory, the Book of Brayer, and The Hymnal.

I’m too blown away to say much more at the moment. It needs a front end and it could also provide useful links to other works, but this is my path to posterity. Cannot put into words how big a deal this is. Total strangers. How many books get recreated in meticulous detail by hands other than the author’s in his own lifetime? (I also owe whoever was posting it for how he posted the original book in the Modern Archive. That was done with a handmade photocopy of each page, easily proven by the bleedthrough from backing pages. No OCR app in batch mode. Hands holding pages over the platen of a large format scanner.) 

Just this morning I was having expensive dreams about the Kamund. Had a technological breakthrough of sorts in the Acrobat app. God, how I was lusting for a new computer when I got this email. I had just been trying to bank the fires of my TechLust…

Now I’m just simmering, like a pot of stew on the stove…