Another sojourn...

I'm freshly back from another crack-of-dawn dash through the back woods. I only saw one mushroom - a baseball-sized puffball - but it had started to provide for the next generation, having halfway turned to brown-black mush in preparation for doing what puffballs do best: puffing their spores out into the world.

I got caught behind a pair of cattle, a mother and daughter if I'm not mistaken, who insisted on trotting down the middle of the road in front of me for about half a mile before the road widened enough to let them find refuge on the side.

I had scanned a Forest Service map to give me a bigger backdrop against which to use the PathAway program on my Palm, but it would appear that the map - which seems quite accurate, showing the boundaries of the USGS topographic maps and latitude and longitude marks along the edges - doesn't jive with reality as viewed by the GPS unit.

The other alternative is that, in processing the map, the utility that came with PathAway didn't handle the entered coordinates correctly. When I processed the earlier map (which is very local), I kept wondering why I could not show both the map and a track at the same time, and it turned out that the latitude/longitude coordinates in the map file were wrong (of course, I could have sworn I had entered them correctly to begin with).

As a result, it was likely that the map and the track were being shown at the same time... it was just that my starting point (the house) wasn't on the map, as far as the program could tell. When I entered corrected coordinates and reloaded the map onto my Palm, the problem cleared up.

Ultimately, the track feature seems pretty useful if I want to create an accurate map of Pagosa; the maps being published out there are consistently flawed (heck, the street I live on pretty much dead-ends at my driveway; according to most maps, it continues on to Pagosa Boulevard.

* * *A whole pile of stuff on the plate, right now. I'm almost finished with a third State Standard (aka, "GOST"), after which I have 7 electronic files received yesterday, after which I have three more paper documents. Oh, and I have a 3,500-word article on export control to write for the ATA Chronicle by Monday (though I am sure, knowing editorial habits, that I can probably squeeze a day or two past that, in a pinch).

Seeing as there are no mushrooms out there, I don't really feel so bad. Maybe next weekend?

Cheers...

Marking (wasting) time...

Having someone leave the store today to go get Galina to spell me just didn't work out, so she got the day off. Shannon and Huntur came be the store to keep Drew and me company, and that was nice. I think I'm getting the knack of working with an infant, because Huntur and I had some fun (i.e., teaching her how to press the NO SALE key on the cash register, which causes the machine to make satisfyingly strange noises and pop the cash drawer out).

Upon returning home, I took a one-hour nap.

As I took a closer look at the files sent to me yesterday, I notice that all but one of them are Excel files! Aaarrrgghhhh!

Attempting to import them into Déjà Vu netted me a "no can do" error, one which Atril (the publisher) has been awfully negligent in addressing (especially since I not only brought it to their attention, but also sent a sample offending file, too).

So, I decided to finally bite the bullet and become conversant in the Trados package that I bought a couple of months ago and only got around to installing a couple of weeks ago.

Unlike about 90% of software out there that appears (to me, at least) to be pretty intuitive, working with Trados without the manuals is pretty much impossible. You get the feeling you're a primate trying to fly a Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, all of the documentation (except for a thin "Getting Started" guide) is on the CD in PDF format, and since my monitor is not exactly big (nor is my machine's memory), and since I hate reading online program documentation that's not germane to a task I'm performing right now (e.g., getting help for a function call while programming), that meant having to print out a couple of books worth of pages.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to figure out what documentation you need, so you have to basically start somewhere by printing out something with a likely title. Of course, what I got I didn't really need. Along the way, I was exposed to an interesting phenomenon that I finally had explained to me by a visit to the Adobe web site.

It turns out that if the available resources on your system are low, Adobe will not be able to send text to the printer. You get pages with copyright symbols, shadow backgrounds for paragraphs, and a few lines, but no text. That only cost me 50 pages.

Anyway, after printing out 250 pages of the guide to the "Translator's Workbench," it turns out that this particular star in the Trados firmament does not support the translation of Excel files. I had to use something called "T-Window for Excel" to do that, according to the "Getting Started" guide. Unfortunately, the PDF file I needed was not available via the window that is displayed when the Trados CD is AutoRun, so I had to go in by hand and track down the file myself.

Another 68 pages.

Progress so far is easy to calculate: zero.

Now that the 68 pages has finished printing, I'll go punch holes and read the sucker. I've got to get moving: The first file I have to translate is 2015 rows long and 16 columns wide. Ye gods.

Cheers...