More power problems...

When the power went out yesterday, Galina and I ended up going to the Shanghai restaurant, where they were serving meals by candlelight. The power came back in 40 minutes or so, in the middle of our meal.

Today, a thunderstorm came by and flash-bam! struck somewhere near the house. In deference to a superior power, the electricity went out. (I'm writing this from the store.)

Shortly after leaving the store this morning to go home and translate, I got a call from client M, asking me to do an urgent short translation, and fit it in, before proceeding to finish El Humungo. I complied. Later, just shortly before the power went out, the project manager called to find out if I could take some pages back from Vladimir V.

Heh.

So much for the "inflexible" deadline of September 27.

I agreed to take 25 pages, due next Thursday morning.

And called again, a few minutes later, to tell them to expect my files tomorrow, as it would appear the power outage is not general, but local, and it may take the power company people a little time to get me back online.

Galina just left to go home and read, so I am here until closing. Perhaps it's time to make myself useful and maybe get a jump start on tomorrow's activities (e.g., report, vacuuming, etc.). With any luck, the power will be back on later tonight, and I'll finish the current slug of El Humungo and send off at least part of it before retiring.

Cheers...

A hard nut?

Remarks by FBI Director Robert Mueller, from an article at CNN.com:

"Clearly, these 19 terrorists were not supermen using extraordinarily sophisticated techniques. They came armed with simple box cutters," he said.

"But they also came armed with sophisticated knowledge about how to plan these attacks abroad without discovery, how to finance their activities from overseas without alarm, how to communicate both here and abroad without detection, and how to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in our free society.

"There were no slip-ups. Discipline never broke down. They gave no hint to those around them what they were about," Mueller's statement continued. "They came lawfully. They lived lawfully. They trained lawfully. They boarded the aircraft lawfully. They simply relied upon everything from the vastness of the Internet to the openness of our society to do what they wanted to do without detection." (emphasis mine)

I'm probably overreacting, but I don't see the "vastness of the Internet" as a major factor in the attacks. And even the part about the "openness of our society" makes me a little jumpy.

Whenever cops start talking like this, I get the feeling that a major part of their implied solution is to do things to make the Internet less vast, and our society less open. It's an easy solution, which gives every indication of working... until the next attack, after which the proposed solution is simply more of the same.

Clearly nobody is thinking "outside the box" on this, certainly not in government circles.

Cheers...

That was then... this is now...

Al Gore, September 23, 2002:

"Back in 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War. And I felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield."

Senator Al Gore, 1991:

"I want to state this clearly, President Bush should not be blamed for Saddam Hussein's survival to this point. There was throughout the war a clear consensus that the United States should not include the conquest of Iraq among its objectives. On the contrary, it was universally accepted that our objective was to push Iraq out of Kuwait, and it was further understood that when this was accomplished, combat should stop."

Ya gotta love them politicians... as well as our ever-vigilant media, which for the most part did not care to point out Mr. Gore's changed recollection of how he felt at the end of the Gulf War. Stuff like that only confuses viewers, I guess.

Cheers...

I could write a book...

...in fact, I just spent the past couple of weeks writing about half of one. So far, the word count for El Humungo stands at just above 42,000. Somewhere, I recall seeing 70,000 as the number of words in an "average" novel.

The juice was back on at the house by the time I got there after closing the store. I received the other 25 pages in mail, and will do my level best not to look at them until Monday. As it is, I'll probably get up early tomorrow and start reviewing what I've done. I am definitely done for today.

If I review 10 pages per hour, though, it'll take me pretty much all day (80 pages). Ideally, I'd like to be done with this part of the assignment by the time I go to the store tomorrow morning, but I don't think that's realistic. If we assume I work for 3 hours, that means I'll have to review about 30 pages per hour. Each of the 16-page (or so) sections I reviewed so far took me about two hours, so do the math...

Oh, well... I'll get through it when I get through it, I suppose.

* * *Ever since the Marines, I've been blessed with the ability to sleep pretty much through anything. In the course of my life, I've slept through movies, conversations, the sound of people typing, machinery running, thunder crashing, and even mortar rounds doing their thing. It's all a matter of finding the "rhythm" of the sound and then removing it from the among the things you pay attention to as you fall asleep.

Ming Toy, the Peke Who Would Be King, on the other hand, has developed this exquisite method of completely randomizing the noise that he makes in the early morning, and it drives me nuts. More to the point, it gets me up. I don't mind when he starts to belch, grunt, wheeze, scratch, kick, roll, sniff, yawn, rub, sniff, and pant after the alarm has gone off, but his behavior these past couple of mornings (up to an hour before reveille), has caused uncharitable thoughts to cloud my brain the first thing in the morning.

This is not a good thing, either for me... or... for... Ming. ;^)

Heck with it... I need to get up anyway.

* * *What I love about Linux HOWTOs is how quickly they become obsolete. As a case in point, in the Cyrillic HOWTO I have, it suggests that I might wish to execute the command

> echo -ne "\033(K"

on each of the several consoles that are created when Linux boots. (This arcane command sends a control sequence to the console that allows Latin/Cyrillic toggling using the right Ctrl key. I think.)

In reality, though, on 'onegin' (running Seawolf), I don't have to run that particular command. At all. The capability is just there.

Another interesting characteristic: in looking at the /etc/rc.d directory, I see where I could go in and modify rc.sysinit to do the dirty work with the glyphs, etc. before anything really gets going during the boot process. Unfortunately, any and all attempts to edit the file (as root, natch) do not work.

I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation for this, but for the moment, I've stuck the font manipulation into the rc.local file, which does the deed near the end of the bootup process. The only difference I can see is that without an early load of the Cyrillic characters, most of the informative boot-up messages are displayed as white squares.

I can live with that for a while.

I've also gone in and tweaked PuTTY to display KOI8-R and use the Caps Lock key to toggle between alphabets, so now I can read and compose e-mail with Russian characters on 'onegin' from my Windows desktop.

Among immediate goals in this area is the acquisition of the Russian dictionary for the ispell program. I should probably give some serious thought to acquiring a Russian spell-checker to work under Word, too, as I cannot avoid having to improve my skills somehow, and flesh-and-blood spelling help is not always available.

Time to go to bed, methinks. Despite the arrival of 25 more pages of drivel, I feel as if a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Cheers...