It's great when a plan comes together...

I awoke ahead of my alarm this morning, at 5:30, and picked up the phone to call the publishers of Internationale Politik. Herr Hofmann was out of the office, but the woman who answered the phone heard me out and graciously faxed me a copy of the article, gratis.

I'd wrote an e-mail to brenk last night as I was falling asleep at the keyboard, related to this issue, with the happy result being a response that included her address and phone number... which I called after finishing my call to Germany. We had a nice, if brief conversation.

Why all the brouhaha?

You see, I'd agreed to translate the Russian version of the article into English for client T in Chicago. The English text I received from Germany did resemble the text of the Russian version of the German original (are your eyes moving around like mine did when I wrote that?), but there were some striking differences, too. These were due either to the fact that the text of the original may have changed over time, or perhaps something more sinister (Six Days of the Condor comes to mind here).

Just joking about the "sinister" part.

In the end, having the English did not make the work go particularly faster, but it did cut the time required to dope out the mediocre quality of the fax I received, and gave me a good idea of what the author was trying to say.

* * *So what, you might ask, might possess me to accept work on top of El Humungo? Three reasons.

1) It's good for the ego. Not ego in the sense of "I can do it all," but in the sense of "I need to work on something that doesn't frustrate the heck out of me." Working on El Humungo is like driving through lower Manhattan at 5 pm on a weekday. Progress is slow, and pretty soon, you have a headache from the noise and exhaust. After a little while, you get the feeling that you'll never again be able to move your car a distance of more than 10 feet without having to stop.

It's the same way with translation. I get depressed when I have to look up every second word. After doing this job, I now actually look forward to wading back in to do some of El Humongo.

2) It's good for the pocketbook. No explanation necessary, I hope.

3) It's good for client relations. One problem with accepting large jobs from clients is that it shuts you off from being able to accept jobs of reasonable size from other clients. (This side job was about as big as it could be - about 2000 words - and still make it possible for me to take it.) Being occasionally unavailable for work for a client is no big deal, but if a client calls you several times and you have to refuse work because you're busy, the probability of being called again drops with every subsequent call, since by this time, the client's found someone to "replace" you.

* * *I called Irina K. about the job in Kazakstan. She reports that all paperwork has been sent off to the Russian side for vetting. When she finds something out, she says, I'll be among the first to know. I figure I'll call her again in 10 days to see what, if anything, has developed (unless, of course, I hear from her first). I most certainly don't want to receive two days' notice to prepare for a 6-week trip, and especially not to a place like Leninsk.

Back to work!

Cheers...

More than 110%...

I had intended to do 8 more pages of El Humungo. I did nine. (Whoo-whoo!)

On the other hand, the morning's ego-boosting exercise did, indeed, lighten the drudgery of looking up an obscenely high number of machining terms.

If client M can be relied upon for anything, it's having a number of project managers who do not coordinate work among themselves. I got a call from one of them asking about my availability. I said it was lousy. Can I do a 12,000 word state standard by, say, the fourth? I doubt it, I replied. Let me send it to you and see what you think, she says.

I cannot commit to that level of work once I'm through with the current job. A morning here and there, okay, but not four solid days of work. I'm planning to take this weekend easy, and then apply myself to the paper chase that's been hanging over my soul over in the next room. If I'm lucky - and if the Kazakstan gig works out - I may even have a couple of quiet days interspersed in which to brood and go over to bother Feht.

* * *Ever the inquisitive sort, I found an interesting package called MicroBlogger, which I do not intend to replace LJ, but looks like it can be easily adapted to maintain a blog-like page on a web site, as-in-for-instance my professional site. What makes the package so interesting is that the main "engine" is a bash script, and at no point in the proceedings does one need to know anything about CSS, CGI, PHP, Perl, etc.

Now, if only I had the time... :^)

Cheers...