An uneasy night...

Like many, I was afraid of the dark as a child, imagining hoary monsters who materialized and dematerialized at will in the darkened corners of my room, but that fear eventually faded. Indeed, during my stint in the Marines, when I learned to manage anxiety about stuff that really was out there - ranging from insects and snakes to people with unfriendly motives - I don't think I ever experienced the same level of apprehension, even after getting bit a few times.

Last night, as I lay tossing and turning in a futile effort to fall into the arms of Morpheus, I tossed my blanket over my shoulder and felt a sharp pain on my shoulder blade. It was as if somehow, a needle had gotten stuck in the blanket and landed wrong end first on my skin.

But I hadn't tossed the blanket that hard. A tentative probe showed a bump to be forming on the skin.

Something had bit me.

And for the first time in a long, long time, my mind went into a kind of mode that I hadn't experienced since I was a kid. Bee? Tarantula? Scorpion?

It sure as heck was not a mosquito.

I turned on the light, and saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was as if a phantom had struck at me.

I went to the bathroom to get a better look at my shoulder, but saw nothing special, other than a bite.

As I came back into the room, I saw the culprit: a member of the wasp family. The insect was bobbing up and down at the ceiling, looking, I suppose, for a way out. Feeling less than charitable, I grabbed a recent copy of PC Week and waited patiently for the flying nuisance to settle somewhere. As I waited, I noticed about a half dozen mosquitos planted on the ceiling. Eventually, the wasp tired and lighted.

I will skip the details of the ensuing carnage, in which I ruthlessly eliminated the witnesses, too.

Despite having cleared the room of biting critters, I nonetheless found it difficult to fall asleep. I think my mood of last night was partially to blame.

* * *I put PathAway through its paces on the way to the store this morning. It's quite impressive, although the maps I created yesterday for the Palm fail to actually show the side roads around here (I think the problem lies with the original graphic I used to generate the PathAway maps; the roads on that graphic are maybe one or two pixels wide - except for Hwy 160, which is the main drag around here and which shows up strongly on the map - so I figure when the bitmap was processed to create maps for my black-and-white Palm screen, the side roads got washed out).

More later.

Cheers...

Productive...

It was a good day for translation, I think.

Client T from Houston calls first thing in the morning. Ten pages, due soonest. No sweat.

Client G from Chicago follows up on an e-mail from a couple of days ago and sends me a two-page fax. Again, no sweat.

Client M from Houston had sent me a 120-page document yesterday with some really weird instructions about what, exactly, the end client wanted translated. I'd looked at the file early this morning and figured it'd take me longer to count the words I translated than it would to actually translate the words. Time estimate: 3-5 hours, depending on how good my eyesight was during the review. The thing is due tomorrow afternoon, which is why I felt confident about accepting the two other jobs mentioned above.

In this case: sweat. But not because of time constraints... at least not directly.

I have rarely seen such a "document." It is possible that a thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand computers running Word might come up with something having more formatting problems, but I wouldn't take any bets on it.

This was, indeed, an extreme case of "shoehorning" words onto a page, since I ran across an extraordinary number of places where adding or deleting a letter would cause strange things to happen to the formatting (color changes, font size adjustments, disappearance of bullets, just to name three).

I've completed the beast and will look at it again tomorrow.

* * *A couple of weeks ago, one of my old coworkers asked me to write a letter in support of his petition to the INS to classify him as an alien of exceptional scientific skill. I was happy to write it, but the "samples" that his attorney sent sort of made my jaw drop.

Apparently, I'm supposed to write something that tells the INS what a cool guy I am, and only then should I actually say anything about Alex (the guy who's applying). It took me a while to get over my natural modesty, but after a couple of belts of Jameson's and reading a couple of chapters of a marketing book that shall go unmentioned, I finally sat down and let loose. I finished a few minutes ago and sent my draft off to see how well it flies with Alex's lawyer.

* * *The problem of the disappearing roads on the GPS maps displayed by my Palm were, indeed, the result of not converting the color bitmap that GpsDrive fetched from Expedia into a plain black-and-white image. I redid the maps and now the roads show up fine.

* * *There's still a pile of translation left on the plate. Time to go rest up and prepare.

Cheers...