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Moving along smoothly...
Jul. 24th, 2002 08:35 pmThere is a welcome lull in the translation end of the world right now. An expected job has not come through, and the phones are quiet. Ah, well... that's the way the dice roll, I suppose.
I got a nice referral from a colleague to possibly do some subtitling. I'm sure I can do the work, but the client is offering a flat fee to provide subtitles for one hour's worth of audio, and I have no idea how that might translate (no pun intended) into an hourly rate. (Actually if it takes between 10 and 20 real-time hours to do the hour of audio, the rate wouldn't been too terribly bad, and I might be able to use the experience, expecially if I can wangle a screen credit out of the client in addition to the flat fee.)
I yanked 'alice' from the front counter and replaced it with 'cyril'. After making sure my licenses were in order, I installed Office 97 and ran up against a strange phenomenon: loading the rate spreadsheet threw an error along the lines of "prohibited object access," which was only solved by hitting Google, going to the only page that came up in response to my query (said page being in Italian), and gisting my way through the article until I came to the part that talked about Office 97 problems under NT.
It turns out Excel writes to \WINNT\SYSTEM32, which is something that the NTFS file system won't let you do by default. The Italian article had a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base, and I gleaned what I needed to know from there. In the end, I modified the access rights to that subdirectory and eventually got the rate spreadsheet to work on 'cyril'. Hopefully, Galina is now happy.
After work, Drew, Brady, and I went to the local golf club to hit some balls at their driving range. I felt much better swinging the club today than I did last time. In fact, out of about 15 shots with Drew's 8 iron, I'd say that 8 of them or so landed within 20 feet of each other at just about the 100-yard flag. While that's not quite in the Tiger Woods class, for me that's more than respectable.
Lee got all excited about acquiring a Honda from a local used car dealer. I was less than excited about her getting herself about $12K into debt over a 4 year period, with her not currently employed, etc.
In discussions with local insurance folks, it turns out that most companies operating in Colorado use one's credit rating (!?) to determine one's car insurance rate. The agent I spoke with agreed such a practice is outrageous (she even said they'd lost business because of it), but said the agency was powerless to do anything about it. Me, I can't think of any plausible connection between insurance risk and one's creditworthiness, and thus conclude that it's just another example of Taking the Little Guy for a Ride.
I put the second Dell, running RedHat, through its paces today. The machine's name is the lovely Greek/Russian 'evdokia', and if you notice a pattern in my naming of machines at the store (alice, borg, cyril, demosthenes, evdokia), you're right. In any event, I downloaded Yet Another Copy of OpenOffice to install on evdokia, along with the Java Runtime Environment from Sun (which took me a bit to understand how to actually install... RTFM helped this time).
Time to rest. Lee leaves Saturday, and Galina will be driving her to Albuquerque. I'm missing her already.
Cheers...
I got a nice referral from a colleague to possibly do some subtitling. I'm sure I can do the work, but the client is offering a flat fee to provide subtitles for one hour's worth of audio, and I have no idea how that might translate (no pun intended) into an hourly rate. (Actually if it takes between 10 and 20 real-time hours to do the hour of audio, the rate wouldn't been too terribly bad, and I might be able to use the experience, expecially if I can wangle a screen credit out of the client in addition to the flat fee.)
I yanked 'alice' from the front counter and replaced it with 'cyril'. After making sure my licenses were in order, I installed Office 97 and ran up against a strange phenomenon: loading the rate spreadsheet threw an error along the lines of "prohibited object access," which was only solved by hitting Google, going to the only page that came up in response to my query (said page being in Italian), and gisting my way through the article until I came to the part that talked about Office 97 problems under NT.
It turns out Excel writes to \WINNT\SYSTEM32, which is something that the NTFS file system won't let you do by default. The Italian article had a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base, and I gleaned what I needed to know from there. In the end, I modified the access rights to that subdirectory and eventually got the rate spreadsheet to work on 'cyril'. Hopefully, Galina is now happy.
After work, Drew, Brady, and I went to the local golf club to hit some balls at their driving range. I felt much better swinging the club today than I did last time. In fact, out of about 15 shots with Drew's 8 iron, I'd say that 8 of them or so landed within 20 feet of each other at just about the 100-yard flag. While that's not quite in the Tiger Woods class, for me that's more than respectable.
Lee got all excited about acquiring a Honda from a local used car dealer. I was less than excited about her getting herself about $12K into debt over a 4 year period, with her not currently employed, etc.
In discussions with local insurance folks, it turns out that most companies operating in Colorado use one's credit rating (!?) to determine one's car insurance rate. The agent I spoke with agreed such a practice is outrageous (she even said they'd lost business because of it), but said the agency was powerless to do anything about it. Me, I can't think of any plausible connection between insurance risk and one's creditworthiness, and thus conclude that it's just another example of Taking the Little Guy for a Ride.
I put the second Dell, running RedHat, through its paces today. The machine's name is the lovely Greek/Russian 'evdokia', and if you notice a pattern in my naming of machines at the store (alice, borg, cyril, demosthenes, evdokia), you're right. In any event, I downloaded Yet Another Copy of OpenOffice to install on evdokia, along with the Java Runtime Environment from Sun (which took me a bit to understand how to actually install... RTFM helped this time).
Time to rest. Lee leaves Saturday, and Galina will be driving her to Albuquerque. I'm missing her already.
Cheers...
