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My little experiment with translation at the store must be deemed a failure, if for no other reason that, in preparing to go home for the day, I found one, last, additional page of source text that had separated from its brothers and sisters in the hurly-burly world of the store's physical desktop.
If I had been working at my office, it would have been apparent to me that a two-week agenda that stops on Wednesday of the second week was missing something. I would have paid more attention to my job checklist, that will keep me on the straight and narrow if I follow it. In the end, there are just too many distractions at the store. Two scary translations out of two is enough.
* * * Galina and I arrived at the Rotary Club's "Casino Night" and were each weighted down with $50,000 in fake cash, to be used to play blackjack, poker, roulette, craps, or the wheel of fortune. One's ill-gotten gains could then be used to buy $25,000 tickets that would be entered in individual raffles for a slew of prizes donated by local businesses. Some kind of cruise was the prize of the evening, and everyone who bought a ticket to this blowout was entered.
Galina seemed to have a good time. We started playing at the blackjack table, where one of her friends took her under her wing with personalized instruction. After a few minutes, I wandered off to the poker table, ostensibly the only game in the house where skill counts more than chance (and regrettably, I haven't the skill...)
In general, though, gambling holds no special allure for me.
On the rare occasions I do buy a lottery ticket, it'll be when the "expected value" of winning exceeds the cost of the ticket (see my analysis on the odds of winning the Texas lottery, but I digress...). Back during my first COMDEX as a Borland employee, I recall spending three hours at a blackjack table and walking away with $20 or so more in my pocket than I sat down with... and figuring I'd have made more in tips serving drinks during that time.
A lot of it has to do with the level of pain you're willing to absorb. If I'd have been sitting at the $20 table there, in Las Vegas, instead of the $1 table, then proportionally, I'd have walked away with $200 for those same three hours, all other things being equal. And there lies the rub. When one has $1 at stake on a bet, one bets one way; when one has $20 on the table... well, let's say that the prospect of losing such a substantially larger sum might cause one to bet some other way given the same cards.
Another part of it is the kind of game-player that I am. When I play a game (ping-pong, chess, what-have-you), I throw myself into it fully, focusing on what needs to be done to win. Under those circumstances, it's really hard to carry on side conversations, drink alcohol, or do any of the other things that gamblers - or at least casual gamblers - seem to take for granted.
(Indeed, one might argue that the purpose of a casino night is not to sit for hours and watch your stack of plastic chips dwindle down to nothing, but as an opportunity to do a little networking. As I looked around the room, I was surprised to note just how few of the people attending the party were familiar to me, and I noticed a handful of people who were intent not on their cards or dice, but on "working the room.")
Anyway, we parlayed our combined $100,000 into one last red $5,000 chip, and fed it to a blackjack table, where we managed to get hot and quintuple our money in short order. We gathered up our winnings and took it on the lam, buying a raffle ticket for a weekend-for-two in Santa Fe. We were home by 10 pm.
* * * While waiting for Galina to get ready yesterday, I took a look at the manual for the ThinkPad docking station. The manual shows that the station's connectors are SCSI connectors. There is also an ISA connector, to allow installation of ISA hardware, but upon closer examination the connector on the station side appears to be proprietary. Oh, well.
* * * It's tiime to finish the translation I worked on yesterday. Afterward, I can either go so some work at the store or continue with the remaining translation and editing job.
Cheers...
If I had been working at my office, it would have been apparent to me that a two-week agenda that stops on Wednesday of the second week was missing something. I would have paid more attention to my job checklist, that will keep me on the straight and narrow if I follow it. In the end, there are just too many distractions at the store. Two scary translations out of two is enough.
Galina seemed to have a good time. We started playing at the blackjack table, where one of her friends took her under her wing with personalized instruction. After a few minutes, I wandered off to the poker table, ostensibly the only game in the house where skill counts more than chance (and regrettably, I haven't the skill...)
In general, though, gambling holds no special allure for me.
On the rare occasions I do buy a lottery ticket, it'll be when the "expected value" of winning exceeds the cost of the ticket (see my analysis on the odds of winning the Texas lottery, but I digress...). Back during my first COMDEX as a Borland employee, I recall spending three hours at a blackjack table and walking away with $20 or so more in my pocket than I sat down with... and figuring I'd have made more in tips serving drinks during that time.
A lot of it has to do with the level of pain you're willing to absorb. If I'd have been sitting at the $20 table there, in Las Vegas, instead of the $1 table, then proportionally, I'd have walked away with $200 for those same three hours, all other things being equal. And there lies the rub. When one has $1 at stake on a bet, one bets one way; when one has $20 on the table... well, let's say that the prospect of losing such a substantially larger sum might cause one to bet some other way given the same cards.
Another part of it is the kind of game-player that I am. When I play a game (ping-pong, chess, what-have-you), I throw myself into it fully, focusing on what needs to be done to win. Under those circumstances, it's really hard to carry on side conversations, drink alcohol, or do any of the other things that gamblers - or at least casual gamblers - seem to take for granted.
(Indeed, one might argue that the purpose of a casino night is not to sit for hours and watch your stack of plastic chips dwindle down to nothing, but as an opportunity to do a little networking. As I looked around the room, I was surprised to note just how few of the people attending the party were familiar to me, and I noticed a handful of people who were intent not on their cards or dice, but on "working the room.")
Anyway, we parlayed our combined $100,000 into one last red $5,000 chip, and fed it to a blackjack table, where we managed to get hot and quintuple our money in short order. We gathered up our winnings and took it on the lam, buying a raffle ticket for a weekend-for-two in Santa Fe. We were home by 10 pm.
Cheers...
