Semagic...

I support and use sema's client.

I don't know what all the brouhaha with regard to sema's client is about, but I've used it and think it's pretty neat. While I'd have trouble characterizing it as "the best" since my grading of such clients is on a pass/fail basis, I do continue to use it on the machines where I've installed it (two places).

Lest any reader think I am perhaps biased or that my experience is thin in the client department, I do hereby present the list of clients that I've used to post on LJ:

Gtk-LJ: 3.0.0
Gtk-LogJam: 3.0.3
Gtk-LoserJabber: 1.8.1, 1.9.6, 2.0.0
Perl/1.0.1 (a) 9/16: 00, alexpgp
Web: 1.0, 1.0s, 1.1, 1.1s
Win32-MFC-Sema: 1.2-beta3
Win32-MFC: 1.3.8, 1.4.6

I say again, I don't know what the fuss is about, nor do I necessarily want to know, based on hints I've gleaned from this post from johnbot's LJ. Bottom line: Semagic's all right in my book. 'Nuf said.

Cheers...

They win, we lose...

I finally watched Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and it is certainly an epic. It's interesting to see, also, just how closely The Magnificent Seven hews to the story line in terms of some details (catching fish in the creek, rousing the villagers, hiding the young women), yet glosses over some major action (raiding the bandit lair, in the Kurosawa film) or adds some of its own (being sent on their way after the bad guys capture the village).

But that's to be expected, considering this Japanese film weighs in at 3 hours and 23 minutes of viewing time, with a sequence of battle scenes at the end that seem to take as long to play out on screen as in "real life." In the end, though, I ended up with a better empathy for the characters of some of the Japanese peasant farmers in this film than I did for any of the folks playing the role of Mexican peasant farmer in the Hollywood film.

Then again, perhaps the depiction of the Japanese villagers was as hokey and stereotypical as that of the Mexican villagers.

* * *We received dispensation today to postmark tax returns as "April 15" past the 2 pm pickup time. (Normally, you see, once the mail is picked up for the day at the store (2 pm), we are obliged to postmark mail with the following day's date.) Wow. It's almost like the real post office, which by tradition is open until midnight to accept last-minute returns.

Exactly one customer that I served asked for a "Certificate of Mailing" for their return instead of sending their return via Certified Mail. The former costs 75 cents (as opposed to $2.10 for Certified), but does not get tracked, per se. OTOH, if the item never gets to the IRS, the Certificate supposedly will show that an item was mailed to them on the appropriate date. I think overall, the store has probably sold only a handful of such Certificates.

All quiet on the translation front, today, but I'm not complaining. Drew is asking for a couple-three days off to drive to California to pick up Shannon and return by Saturday mid-day sometime. My problem with that is that I can't leave for Houston until Drew is back home, since we only have his car and the van in which to drive around. If I leave for Houston and he is late getting back (or the car breaks down, or whatever), that'll leave Galina pretty high and dry (and by herself, and afoot).

* * *I installed PaperPort 6.1 on Borg and it does a workmanlike job of capturing scans from the store's HP ScanJet. There are two problems with sending faxes using a scanner, however. First, it takes a long time to scan each page (I was spoiled by the original PaperPort, which was a single-sheet scanner that processed an 8.5x11 page in about 5 seconds, if memory serves. Compare that with the 30-40 seconds per sheet required for "modern" scanners). Second, using the Mighty Fax program, I tried sending myself a two-page sample fax of scanned pages. It took nearly 9-1/2 minutes to send just the first page, at which point I canceled the job!

It would appear that our store's "digital fax" service will be limited to sending computer files as faxes for customers (either via something like Mighty Fax or via eFax).

* * *It was fun with Ming today, as we chased him around the house, caught him and then took him outside to clean his hairy little body. He was so hairy that various "stuff" had become entangled in his hair, making him a semiautomatic, Alpo-fed, flat-trajectory, canine dirt-spreader. After cleaning him outside, I bathed him inside, and Galina cut off enough hair to gag a charging rhinoceros, though in truth, no animals - canine or rhino - were harmed in the process.

The wind is howling out there; it'll be something of a miracle if it doesn't keep me up half the night. Gotta give it a run for its money, tho.

Cheers...