Progress...

I sat up a bit last night and eventually got about 2800 words down on phosphor.

The first thing this morning, I checked the Part V document, in preparation for sending it off. I found an omission of about 3 sentences, which is unusual for me (but not unheard of). Glory be to the Gods of "Checking Your Work Before Sending It Off."

Job announcements for Russian-to-English work have been pretty scarce on ProZ since I signed up at the ATA Conference in L.A. Moreover, what I've seen of "public" bids make me go pale (did I mention the bid of $900 to do 250 pages of computer-related text?). Nonetheless, I just submitted my first bid, at my going rate, and hope that my presentation overcomes sensitivity to price. All I need is one job like the one I just bid to make back my ProZ "platinum" membership charge.

Oh, well, that's a fire-and-forget kind of deal... Returning to our plate, what remains of Part IV? About 4 pages. Some of the material I can do in my sleep (tables with numbers); some will be unpleasant (lots of math expressions).

I have to somehow avoid going in to the shop this morning and concentrate on (a) finishing Part IV, (b) printing out the material that my potential new client sent me, and (c) figuring out a way my potential new client can send me that 5-MB file.

To work!

Cheers...

Tech may support?

I called my provider's tech support line after unsuccessfully using their glitzy "we'll call you" feature (you type in your phone number and they promise to call... hilarious).

I wanted to know if there was some kind of hard limit on the size of a file that could be uploaded using my work site's PHP script. The tech on the other end seemed, initially, unwilling to do much in that direction, but after she succeeded in sending me a small file using the script but failed with a large file, she dug in her heels and tried to find out what the problem was.

I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the script first uploads an incoming file into some temporary area, after which PHP itself takes care of planting it in the correct place. It may very well be that somewhere between 3 MB and 5 MB, PHP complains that there is a misconfiguration or something like that going on. (Might the magic number be 4 MB, i.e., 4096 x 1024 bytes?) Unfortunately, there is no way I can get at any error logs, so unless the techs help me, I'm hosed.

There is yet hope. The person who might answer my question will be in later today, and the tech took my number, so I might get a call back... just not using their automated system, I hope.

Cheers...

The Internet is wunnerful...

Drew went and ordered DSL and I agreed to fund half of it if we can figure a way to share the service. Last night, his attempt to install a plain-vanilla NIC on his new Dell didn't work out so well, so I'm trying - having finished a first pass through the translation - to set up Galina's old Toshiba laptop with a new network card so we can use it, sorry old piece of Pentium-equipped, low-power consumption hardware that it is, as our link to the DSL world out there.

Installation goes well until - you guessed it - I get a message saying that a needed file on the Windows 98 2nd edition CD is missing, and would I, please, insert the Windows 98 2nd edition CD?

Yeah, that's right.

This, while showing me that the install procedure appears to have been wandering about somewhere on the machine's hard drive, which ought to be easily distinguishable from a CD, I would imagine.

But I'm not really a technical person.

The file I needed was pc100v2.sys and it was nowhere to be found on the Windows CD. I hit Google with just the name of the missing file and was immediately brought to a site (computergripes.com, which I bookmarked) that presented me with a well-written item that, after venting a bit of spleen in Microsoft's direction, revealed to me that the needed file was on the manufacturer's disk in the A: drive.

Installation complete.

* * *I finished the translation a little over an hour ago and am taking a short break to see if I can install the DSL, as well as to cool down and get a little "distance" from the work, as I have now to take the resulting 20,000 or so words and review them for grammar, spelling, completeness, etc.

For a guy who barely eked out 2800 words for all of yesterday, I screamed through a final few pages that weighed in with as many words in just under 4 hours.

We be SMO-kin'!

Cheers...

Thanks to all...

Holy heck!

I just checked the mail and there were a pile of comments to my post about tech support and PHP, and I'm figuring, "Hey, probably everyone's telling me that my script problem has a trivial solution..."

Nope.

The content was much better.

Thanks, all.

Cheers...

(P.S. for bandicoot: The script allows people to upload files directly to a directory I maintain on my web site's server. This bypasses e-mail, which often gets stodgy if attachments grow past 2 MB in size, not to mention that my current dial-up connection is so slow, my mail server will normally time out before I can fetch a 2-MB attachment from it.)