's like FLYPAPER!

Well, the simple act of dropping Galina off at the store this morning at 8 am resulted in my getting free only around a hour and a half later. Once home, I tried to settle in and work, but things kept interfering.

This continues a trend that began last night, when I sat down and revamped the consultant agreement I'll be sending out to people who want to freelance for me. It is a cross between the wonderful "no-nonsense" language that Borland used to (and maybe still does) use in its legal documents and a hybrid of about four agreements that have been sent to me over the years. The essential structure has even been reviewed by a lawyer. Best of all, it says what I want it to say.

Today, once home, I decided to take the Big Step. Again. Someday, when I have time, maybe I'll explain the nitty-gritty decision-making process behind selecting potential freelancers, but for now, I'll say this: with signed agreement in hand, I've assigned a short piece to a freelancer to see what will result. The deadline is tomorrow at 4 pm, my time. This short piece is something new, and something that I would likely have declined otherwise (though it is pretty short, so maybe I wouldn't have, but I digress...).

As insurance, the piece is short enough to allow me to actually do the whole thing should my freelancer actually fail to come through. Call it a test. What consumed time today was making sure I supplied the freelancer with everything necessary to do the job (e.g., a written description of what I intend to see as a result).

* * *Client T in Houston sent me a 37-pager due Friday at 2 pm my time. What made it particularly strange was that the Word file of the document would keep popping up with an error message to the effect of: "The file is corrupt. You may be able to salvage something by selecting everything, copying the information to the clipboard, creating a new file, and then pasting the clipboard into the new file."

I tried that, and it didn't work. A Web search, however, uncovered a page at the Microsoft technical support site that explained the problem (kinda... it has to do with how many times lists have been changed from numbered lists to bulleted lists... go figure... but, past a certain point the corruption occurs...). It even provided a solution that requires Office 2000 SR-2 (cool, since my VAIO came with Word 2000 SR-1, and SR-2 was a free 8-MB download from Microsoft).

To make a long story short (yeah, I know, too late!), I've gotten rid of whatever ills the file contained. This made it possible for me to import it into DejaVu, where it sits right now, all 1300 segments of it (211 of 'em done, as I write this). Something about groundrules and constraints for an upcoming ISS crew.

I also had a short document for Client U in Houston, due tomorrow morning. It was deceptively easy, so of course I got bogged down in a couple of places, trying for a neat, no-ambiguity "kill" on this term or that. In any event, I finished with it about an hour ago, and sent it off, so now I can concentrate exclusively on the ISS document.

* * *Shannon told me that as she, Drew, and Huntur were returning from Durango last night, they saw two bears lumbering across Highway 160 over by the Parelli ranch. Apparently, pickin's are thin in the high country, so the bears have come down to see what they can scrounge off the human population early this year.

Talking about the kids, they're gone again. I assume they're going to Durango again to visit their friends. I was asleep last night by the time they came back.

* * *Tomorrow, there will be a good opportunity for me to show what I am really made of, and to see what is really important to me. The local dance club is meeting at the PLPOA clubhouse, and I intend to be there with Galina!

And so as to minimize any nervous tension I might feel owing to large volumes of outstanding work, I think I should turn this chair around and resume work for another couple of hours.

Cheers...

Quitting for the night...

I'm taking the opportunity to delve into some of the details of DejaVu as I do this ISS document. One thing that is of interest is the "propagate" function, which takes a sentence, goes looking for similar sentences elsewhere in the document, and then gives you the opportunity to make appropriate changes.

Of course, when the "sentence" is a single word (e.g. "Rationale:"), it's easy. I took some time to understand how to work the feature when the sentence gets longer and more involved. It's pretty neat.

Technically, I'm just short of 1/3 of the way through the document, but by keeping track of my progress (in terms of number of "segments" translated per hour), I seem to be accelerating. In the first hour, I did 82 segments, in an overlapping second hour, I did 94. That's not much data, by itself, but some intermediate checkpoints confirm the acceleration. Much of the effect is likely due to running across sentences (such as "Telemetry monitoring is not required.") that have been propagated, which take almost no time to review (the program flags changes) before moving on to the next segment. Given the amount of propagation I've done, it is likely (no, almost certain) that I'm actually well past the 1/3 point.

But one of the aspects of translation is that it's mostly a lot like traveling: you can rant and rave all you want, but there's little you can do to get there faster. (There are exceptions, as when text turns to boilerplate, but I digress...) The good news is this: having done 400+ segments, there are somewhere between 800 and 900 left to do. At the rate I'm going, I should be able to translate the remaining segments in between 8 and 10 more hours. (I just have to make sure the store doesn't require too much of my presence over the next couple of days!)

In any event, that means I can go dancing with Galina tomorrow night with a perfectly clean conscience!

And now it is well and truly time to go to bed.

Cheers...