alexpgp | Muddling along...

The "state of the plate" is one that cries out for stress testing, which is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, at least as far as my immediate project is concerned. To wit, consider the following sentence, which crossed my field of vision not long ago:

Вертикальное нагружение испытуемого образца производят равномерно, без ударов ступенями нагрузки, равными 10% от эффективного напряжения в образце грунта после предварительного обжатия, определяемого разностью между полным давлением в камере и давлением в поровой жидкости образца, или от значения вертикального эффективного бытового давления, заданного программой испытаний, с интервалами 15 с или непрерывно, обеспечивая приращение относительной вертикальной деформации образца грунта 0,02 за 1 мин.

The specimen being tested is vertically loaded in a uniform manner, without load increment shocks that are equal to 10% of the effective stress in the soil specimen after preliminary compression, defined as the difference between the total chamber pressure and the pressure in the pore-filling liquid of the specimen, or of the vertical effective normal pressure specified in the test program, at 15 sec intervals or continuously, assuring an incremental relative vertical soil specimen deformation of 0.02 over 1 min.

There is something glorious about sentences 81 words long (as this one is)! The only problem, as far as I can see, is that the sentence makes no sense. (Fabulously, making it make sense, past accurately rendering the text, is not part of my job.)

This translation started off dismally slowly, with gobs of geological names that required a lot of online research, but now the text seems to have settled down into a steady soil-science gobbledygook that I almost understand with that part of my mind that's still an engineer.

I am quickly closing on the 6,000-words-left mark in this 9,000-source-word project. The number would be lower, but my best client called with a 1,000-word rush job, and one does not leave one's best client in the lurch, especially if one is headstrong and of the opinion that the 9,000-word job is still doable for Saturday morning.

There are three jobs from the same client lined up after this one, and one more from my best client, which pretty much assures me of Something To Do™ until about mid-December.

* * *I had been very careful when letting Shiloh out of the house these past few days, as she had developed an annoying propensity of running over to the neighbor's house to visit, which the neighbor doesn't mind, apparently, but I do. So all promenades of any kind have been done with the aid of a lead of some kind.

Today, I decided to risk letting Shiloh off the lead, and we had a glorious time where I would fling a flying disk down the long hill in the back of the house and Shiloh would tear off at Mach 3, in a curious ballet of canine legs and elbows, down the hill after the blessed thing. I find it is one of the funniest sights I've seen in a while.

* * *In other news, I've set things up to get the "triple play" from the cable provider (120+ channels of programming, broadband internet service, and broadband phone service). The tech is supposed to come out on Tuesday to set things up. Between now and then, it'd be good to figure out what it'd take to run cable to somewhere in the living room so Galina can watch her beloved tube out there.

* * *I figure I have about another hour of work left in me, whereupon I shall have to go to sleep. If I can get down to 5500 words left to do, I'll be in pretty good shape. We'll see.

Cheers...