The OCR process. [Editor] Just for fun, I thought I would show you all what the process is for me to get Pete's words into the blog. In adjacent posts you can see pictures of his original typed letter to me, the letter with errors marked in red pen, and the output of the OCR program. I corrected the OCR output to produce the final text for posting, shown here.

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September, 25, 2004
Dear Jim,

Well, it is Saturday 11:40 AM and I finally made it down to Education and I almost missed this time too. Friday turned out to be a wipeout as far as my promise to get down here to do some typing.

This morning I heard all the various announcements, which start at 9:00 AM on Saturdays, but decided to keep my head firmly fastened to the pillow and my tray firmly fastened and the seat in the upright position.

As if you could not tell, I am typing this without the benefit of a draft copy, so you are going to have a little extra work on the editing, but it should be good enough and save you the expense of the typing service. When you send me back my latest handwritten letter I will go ahead and type it for you. (Okay, I will type it for me.)

I made it halfway across the compound before one of the eagle-eyed correction officers noticed that I was in need of correction.

As I might have mentioned before, we are supposed to carry not one, but two ID cards. I had forgotten to attach my color coded by housing unit picture ID card. By the time I walked back to the unit and found the card, the moves were over. The CO in the unit said that since I was sent back by the compound officer, I could go ahead back out. However, by the time I made it down to Education the door was already locked. A couple of the worker inmates were waiting to go to eat, so when the staff member came to open the door, after a little discussion as to what I was doing on the compound after the end of the move, she allowed me to enter. So here I am, stuck till they are done serving the noon meal. Yes, I am missing a free meal to type this. I will also miss dinner since that is my walking time. But no sacrifice is too large to get the flow of words back up to speed.

A couple of inmates are cleaning up the print shop area and deconstructing the filing system that I designed. I am going to see if the staff member, there is only one here today, will let me lend my experience. That will also let me get a look at the new machine I will let you know. Stand by. See, any distraction to not have to sit here and use the manual typewriter.
  ¶ 10:16 PM