"Treadin' Water" was a weekly 'humor' column in the University of New Orleans' newspaper The Driftwood. It ran from Sept of 1998 thru May of 2000. More or less. It was written by English major and strange person Daniel J. Slate, who also won UNO's Ella V. Schwing Award for writing and the Louisiana Association of College Composition Award in 1998. He is also featured in the 7th edition of the college textbook Short Takes by Elizabeth Penfield. In 2014, Slate published Without Hope, a novel. On a Cub Scout trip to a bowling alley in second grade, Slate was given a "Most Improved" trophy, which made no sense as the troop was only there for like two hours. Most improved from when? 45 minutes ago? No; they gave it to him so he'd stop crying. Furthermore, Daniel J. Slate is me and I have no idea why I am referring to myself in the third person and I shall stop henceforth.
Since my life is currently a shambles-- an empty, harrowing excuse of a life, a husk of a shell of a life and I am but a shadow of my former self-- a broken, bitter and beaten man...because of this but mostly because of a free driver update on my 7-year-old HP All-In-One scanner, I decided to document these ancient articles by scanning them and then using optical character recognition software to convert them to text. In tremendous frustration, I will retype all of them anyway because OCR software sucks when the source is old newsprint in narrow columns. The original articles were frequently riddled with typos anyway.
And the other thing I decided to do was start writing new articles as weekly blog posts. I guess? Still scanning stuff and figuring out the whole website design part.
But once it is functional, I hope I write something people like. If not, then I hope I wrote something in the late 1990's that people will like once I put it online.
D.J. Slate 2014
Since my life is currently a shambles-- an empty, harrowing excuse of a life, a husk of a shell of a life and I am but a shadow of my former self-- a broken, bitter and beaten man...because of this but mostly because of a free driver update on my 7-year-old HP All-In-One scanner, I decided to document these ancient articles by scanning them and then using optical character recognition software to convert them to text. In tremendous frustration, I will retype all of them anyway because OCR software sucks when the source is old newsprint in narrow columns. The original articles were frequently riddled with typos anyway.
And the other thing I decided to do was start writing new articles as weekly blog posts. I guess? Still scanning stuff and figuring out the whole website design part.
But once it is functional, I hope I write something people like. If not, then I hope I wrote something in the late 1990's that people will like once I put it online.
D.J. Slate 2014