Playing catch-up...

Galina went to the store yesterday, and the kids went up to the ski area, leaving me alone with my translations.

I started the day by doing two pages of the steel tank specification. Then I did the four-pages of "Part 5" which are due on Wednesday, followed by a lousy two pages of Part IV.

In all, 8 pages, when my "plan" calls for 12. OTOH, those 8 pages weighed in at over 4500 words, so it wasn't too bad a day.

I think. The only thing I really remember about it was being really tired and feeling as if it was 5 pm or so when it was really 1:30 in the afternoon.

Today called for someone to go to Durango and rendez-vous with the driver from our box supplier down in Albuquerque. (The last time we let him drop stuff off at the express company in Durango, to be brought to us, the cost of the delivery tripled as the express company began charging us for both the service and the weight.)

After I picked up the merchandise, I went on into Durango and stopped at the Office Depot, where I picked up some Rolodex cards and an ink pad for our Casio cash register.

I got back to the store around 9:45 and was trapped there, helping customers, until about 11.

So far, I've done less than a page of Part IV, in between watching Mozilla crash when trying to execute something inside of MIME.DLL while I try to open mail from my client. I'm wondering whether it's something inside the mail, or just a general problem with the mail end of Mozilla. (I'd upgraded to the 0.9.6 version the other day... all 13 MB or so, at 1.3 kB per second. I was hoping the new version would be a little less, um, free with hogging memory, but I can't tell any difference.)

Time to get back to work.

Cheers...

Feeling poleaxed...

I was so drained earlier this afternoon, that I took a nap from 1:30 to 3. I was awakened by a call from a translator who was looking to subcontract some work. I hope I sounded alert.

I figured the problem with my mail was my mail... but where?

Among other things, I'd been noticing that Mozilla was downloading multiple copies of the same mail message. Today, when Mozilla kept crashing trying to open one and the same message, I decided to check out the "raw" mail file, buried under about six layers of directory.

Yech. Whatever it was supposed to be, at the end of a 54 MB file, it wasn't in the correct format, so I edited it out of thel file.

Then I decided to go to the preferences and get rid of the option to leave mail on my server. I set it up that way a while back when I was moving my mail "base" from machine to machine, and was concerned about losing messages. Today, even without looking, I had a feeling that there was a lot of old mail backed up on my server.

So, I exited all the Mozilla sessions on my system and fired up the MailWarrior program, which has the neat feature of allowing me to look at mail message headers and then selectively download or delete mail messages.

There were just over 450 messages in my work account, and about as many in my personal one. I got rid of anything dated last Friday or earlier.

Back to work. I'm only 3 pages through the day, and I have a Wednesday deadline! Yikes!

Cheers...

Kudoz question: What is meant by 'semper fidelis'?

A load of people answered this one on ProZ before I saw it, noting that the Latin means "always faithful," but I added my two cents anyway:

"Always faithful / To hell with you (it)!"

As has been noted by others, "semper fidelis" is Latin for "always faithful," and it is the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps.

As the motto of the USMC, "semper fidelis" (and more often, the shorter form "semper fi") is frequently used in a pejorative sense when employed in casual speech, especially among Marines (but not exclusively). Since nobody in their right mind usually goes around uttering short, pithy Latin mottoes to bystanders, it may well be that the person who said this to you meant it in this pejorative sense.

Examples:

"Private, I've just volunteered you for the dirtiest detail in the world."
"Semper fi, Sarge."

"I hear we're not getting resupplied until after the Army gets theirs."
"Yeah, well... semper fi."

Other, more scatological formulations for "semper fi" are possible, too.

Would you believe the asker selected my answer among the others?

The more I think about it, semper fi is a pretty much all-purpose response.

"Hey, you want some of this coffee?"
"Semper fi!"

It doesn't change the basic premise of my answer.


Cheers...

One cash register, ready for service...

I got good and sick and tired of translating for the day, even if I did stop half a page short of my goal. I've got a little contingency built into my plan (so I may as well use it, right?)

So, seeing as how the store was overwhelmed with customers today, I figured I'd apply myself to the task of bringing up the "other" cash register that we found under a pile of junk after we bought the store.

The unit is a Casio PCR-260. The backup batteries are doubtless the original set (Casio brand). I could not find a manual in the store, so I went to look online for it, and found only a Spanish-language version of the document at the Casio web site.

Issues with the unit:
(a) new ink supply needs to be installed;
(b) time and date need to be set;
(c) appropriate tax table needs to be set;
(d) "departments" need to be set up;
(e) taxable departments need to be set up that way;
(f) the plastic arms for the $10 and $20 bills are missing and need to be jerry-rigged.

The first item was taken care of with a store-bought replacement roller. Item (d) was taken care of by prying off the plastic key tops and replacing them with newly inscribed key tops. Item (f) was taken care of by sacrificing a wire coat-hanger.

The rest of the job required looking at the manual (and thanks to tamaraland for her offer to help me make sense of it). It turns out, though, that there are enough recognizable cognates and roots in Spanish (e.g., "Fácil de utilizar") that between my Russian and French, and a talent for using context to make guesses (Ciertas teclas tienen dos funciones = Certain [plural noun related to illustration of keypad] have two functions... duh), I really didn't have any problems reading the book (though I did open a Spanish-English dictionary a couple of times to double-check meanings).

My first hurdle was getting the unit into "program" mode. It wouldn't let me, displaying an E01. Scanning the first couple of pages of the manual, I saw the following note (my approximate translation next to it):

Si se cambia de posición el selector de modo durante una operación de regestro o de programación, se genera un error (aparece E01 en la pantalla).

If the mode selector moves out of position during a register or programming operation, an error will occur (E01 will appear in the display)

So, guessing that someone may have doodled on the keypad before I got to it, I hit the "AMT TEND" key and cleared what appeared to be a register operation in progress. Now, I was cooking with gas.

Setting the time and date was easy, especially since the manual walks you through the process with examples out of a calculator handbook. Basically, this consists of a series of button illustrations printed in the order they need to be pressed, with annotations off to one side. Entering the appropriate values to kick in the local 7% tax table went pretty smoothly, too.

Setting up which "departments" the tax applied to took two tries, as by now I was simply looking at the examples, and got it backward the first time. After winnowing down the store's 16 "departments" to the unit's limit of 10, it turned out that all of the taxable stuff was in the "Retail" department, so that made life easy.

What will not be easy will be training folks to use this baby, since the procedure for hitting the keys is somewhat different from what is used for our "main" cash register in the store. It's not that hard, though, and I smell a training session tomorrow morning.

Cheers...