What a way to start the day...

Everything went well this morning...I even managed to be ready to go a few minutes early. This allowed me to focus attention on the fact that today is "trash day," and that I should put the bagged trash out on the street.

Going out the door, I automatically set the lock on the way out, closing the door behind me.

With the house and car keys still inside.

Immediately forgetting about the trash, I went around to all of the windows to see if - by some miracle - I'd left one of them unsecured. No joy.

I circled the house, muttering "I'm locked out," but keeping my cool, all things considered.

There was no time to call a locksmith, so...I applied my shoulder to the front door, which gave on the second "application."

I splintered the door jamb, but the recess for the dead bolt was unharmed, so I'll be using that method to secure the door for a while (though I'm sure another couple of applications of "shoulder" would erase that obstacle to entry).

By all accounts, the flight control team is earning their pay today; things are not going as smoothly as they are supposed to.

It's nearly noon, and no radiograms have arrived from the Russians, either, so it ought to be an interesting afternoon.

Cheers...

Almost the end of the day...

The radiograms that did arrive today were not anything special, even though the support folks here on the third floor figured they'd be completely rewritten, given that a lot of "replanning" has been going on. My suspicion - the the effect that such replanning would only affect the Shuttle side of house, if it happened at all - seems to have been correct.

While waiting for more work, I decided to improve my professional knowledge by looking for a site that might have standardized computer terminology, e.g., what is a "dialog box" in Russian? Opinions vary, especially among people who don't know all that much about computers.

I found an interesting ftp site using Google, at Microsoft, containing their localization glossaries. The Russian version of the glossary is over 4 MB compressed, and expanded, the file for all the strings in Windows 98 weigh in at over 4 MB (comma delimited, intended for Excel). With duplications, there are something over 30,000 lines of entries in this file alone.

It will take me some time to digest this material, but now it's time to start getting ready to go home.

Cheers...

P.S. Dialog box is "окно диалога" in Russian (non-MS browsers will see only the quote marks; I don't like that any more than you do, as I prefer Opera to IE5).