Dots

Woke up a bit later than I hoped after spending last night with an old work friend and his family. Not helped by the fact I didn't get back from theirs till 1am.

Sanded down the filler on the walls from yesterdays excavating and socket installation. By the time I have finished you couldn't see the other side of the room for dust and there is a thin film over most of the kitchen and downstairs.

Next was a shopping trip to let the dust settle, literally, before vacuuming the dust up and washing the walls down.

The dining room is almost ready to be painted. A couple of touch ups on the walls and we are ready to go this week.

Shopping put away and the dust removed and almost time for the ironing and watching the GP from this afternoon before collecting J from the airport.

This weeks challenge word was DOT. Not the easiest. Had an idea when taking some Sudafed to get rid of the man flu at the beginning of the week when I noticed the braille on the packet.
This will be my entry into the challenge this week.

Braille history in brief
Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who went blind following a childhood accident. At the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet in 1824 as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first digital (binary) form of writing.

Night writing, developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without light. In Barbier's system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille.

Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole 12-dot symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another.

Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions, and even logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand. The expanded English system, called Grade 2 Braille, was complete by 1905.