Too much excitement for one night...

Lee and I did actually get on the road at a few minutes after 9 am yesterday morning, to the accompaniment of a light snowfall. As I drove down 160 toward town, I wondered just how far south we'd have to go to lose the packed snow on the road. What I didn't anticipate was the blowing snow that temporarily put me in a whiteout state (visibility, literally zero feet) that tagged along with us almost down to Espanola.

It took us three hours to cover 87 miles, at which point I was feeling pretty low. Lee's flight left at 4:30 pm, and allowing merely an hour for check-in, etc. (on one of the busiest travel days of the year) left us about 3-1/2 hours to cover another 150 miles or so.

Slowly, road conditions made it possible to increase speed. As we hit I-25 at Santa Fe, it turned out that if we held to the speed limit (75 mph), we could make the airport by 2:40 pm or so.

We did, despite the blowing snow, since none of the white stuff was adhering to the road surface.

After dropping Lee off at the Sunport, I tooled over to the Sam's Club that Galina had given me instructions for, where I picked up the specified items for the store. I also picked up a laminator, as we've had to turn away entirely too many people who need that service.

Coming home was not fun. I had intended to have a nice steak for my trouble in coming down to Albuquerque, but when I got to this restaurant that had been advertised on an interstate billboard, I found my urge for steak had dimmed, so I turned instead into the parking lot for a local Luby's, where I ordered a serving of liver and onions with a side order of salad.

Coming back home, I had apprehensions of the road conditions and of any wayward deer or elk who decided to cross the highway in front of me. I could have saved myself the worry about the deer and elk. Instead, I managed to go off the road.

Twice.

The first time, I'm not really sure what happened, except that a few miles short of the thriving metropolis of Chromo, Colorado (two buildings and a post office) my front end began to gently oscillate left and right. My attempts to correct the movement exacerbated the oscillation and, before I knew it, put me in an uncontrolled skid that landed me about 10 yards off the road. Fortunately, a passing motorist helped me out (I packed a long, stout rope for just such an occasion). It was fortunate, too, that no oncoming traffic was happening by at the time. As I unhitched the rope from the rear of the van, I noticed that the ice on the road must've been an inch thick if it was a millimeter.

Back on the road, going a lot slowing, and a few miles later, I again found myself in the (snow-covered) weeds, but this time I'm sure it was the wind that did me in (I felt something grab the car and move it). Apparently, my good fortune still was in force: I was not so far off the road that I required any assistance getting out.

Needless to say, I crept back to Pagosa through the rest of that stretch at a daredevilish 20 miles per hour. There are some places along the road where leaving the road involves very unpleasant consequences (including sudden drops in altitude, if you get my meaning). They say three times is a charm, and I was in no mood to provide a test case to either support or disprove the notion.

In any event, I finally got home somewhere around 9:30 pm, leaving the van stuck halfway up the as-yet-unplowed driveway. Worse, unless the kids were able to snag a blank tape somewhere, I missed this week's episode of The X Files.

I am most definitely spoiled.

Cheers...

There's no stopping the insanity...

Copy protection, as well as various other schemes designed to thwart piracy, came on strong in the early days of personal computing and then waned as it became clear that there was really no way to get the upper hand with pirates, and that the only people who were affected (and not positively) were your legitimate users.

At least in the U.S. by my observations.

Some programs, notably applications developed in Europe and Russia, nonetheless aggressively pursued copy protection, often with the use of "dongles," or hardware devices that had to be installed on one's computer in order for the program to work.

My favorite horror story concerning these devices concerned an expert-system building tool (which shall remain nameless) that used this form of copy protection. On a trip from Florida to California to pitch our company's services to a prospective client, the demonstration program I was to show crashed and burned for no apparent reason. There were no warning messages or anything. Just a hung computer.

Upon returning home - with no contract, as you might imagine - it turned out that any machine to which we attached the dongle I had taken with me to California would crash if we tried to use the expert-system tool.

A call to the publisher revealed that the dongle was dead. A short conversation later, it was determined that passage through an airport x-ray machine was enough to disrupt the programming on the dongle's delicate internal circuits. Some additional conversation later, it became clear that the vendor had known about this problem for some time, but had declined to inform its customers, for reasons best known to its management. Had we known about the problem, perhaps that demo would have turned out differently.

The point of all this recollection is my immediate experience with an outfit in the U.K. that's flogging a new translation product called SDLX. I paid for an "upgrade" from a competing product and received a license number, but attempting to download the product (13.4 MB) from the company's site is turning out to be a real bear.

My first attempt to download via a web page died, which did not prevent me from getting an automatically generated piece of mail congratulating me on my download and informing me that my 20-day free support period started now. All subsequent attempts to download the file died, except for the part where I get this e-mail (I have more than a dozen as I write this).

Failing this approach, I decided to go the alternate route, which involves downloading 10 disk-sized files. This is a pain in the butt, as now I have to handhold the process every few minutes, but I need the files.

Clicking on the third file in the series, my browser opens a new window and begins to display a binary file. Right-clicking and doing a save-as does nothing.

Two strikes.

I do some digging and find I'm doing a behind-the-scenes ftp download. After some tries, I figure out the user name and password. I'm downloading the 13.4 MB file as I type this.

I don't think I should have to work this hard, especially as (a) I need a special password to install the software from the downloaded .exe file and (b) I need my license number and an Internet connection to activate the software. (BTW, the publisher suggests that I get online and deactivate the software in case I decide to reinstall Windows at some time in the future.

ROFLHMS.

* * *I got a call from a client, and have a 4-page item that's due by Wednesday. November is turning out to be a very thin month as far as translations are concerned, but on the other hand, that gave me an opportunity to get some good momentum going as far as the store is concerned.

Cheers...