I didn't stop...(revisited)

(This started out as an update to yesterday's post of shortly after 9 pm. However, I noticed a few minutes ago (around 8:30 pm) that this post had taken on a life of its own, repeating the content of the earlier post with the following updated information added. Plus this message had received its own comment. So, I've edited this entry to delete yesterday's material and include only the update. There.)

After sleeping on it, reading LJ friend brenk's comment, and giving it more thought, here's what I came up with for that horrible sentence of late yesterday:

In order to improve product quality, the work place is stocked with highly efficient powder detergents and gradients for treating water, adding softener, and giving the product a natural fresh smell.

That's as good as it's going to get, and now, I really must move on.

Cheers...

Bizarre...

Check this out:

Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation - that he's a time-traveler from the year 2256 - for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28.

"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider.

"But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.

"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."

[...]

Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."

The source of the story is the Weekly World News (via Yahoo!), so one may wish to find a rather large grain of salt to take while reading the article.

Cheers...

A compliment...?

I think!?

I just got this in the e-mail, regarding a recent translation of mine:

[...] and hardly does it sound like a translation from russian. Russians have a lack of feeling in their language, but yet this text smacks of pure english.

I think the writer is mistaken with regard to his assessment of the Russian language, and that takes away from the overall effect, but still...

...its' nice to get a compliment about one's work!

Cheers...

Enough!

I am now convinced that the difficulty I am having with the current document lies with the style of the text and not (necessarily) with any malfunction between my ears. If I knew better, I just might have concluded that the text is - at best - semiliterate.

Anyway, I set a goal this morning that would put me about 2/3 of the way through the job, and I reached that marker a few minutes ago. In actuality, I'm now a little more than 2/3 through, and I am about to hit the section of tables I mentioned yesterday (so, in theory, that ought to go a little faster than the stuff I've been seeing the past couple of days). Regardless, I think I'm going to call it a night and go recharge, or something.

* * *Galina and I made the most wonderful, flavorful borshch today! Everything came together just perfectly (even if we used chicken instead of the 'traditional' beef). I've had about six bowls so far today!

* * *You know, you'd figure that the idiots who send out spam advertising porn would have the intelligence (forget decency) to not try to hide what they're hawking via the use of creative spellings or representations.

The latest stuff I see (in the course of the continuing training of the spambayes filtering software) are tries such as:

p.o.r.n
p/o/r/n
p<!-- dc45 -->orn

using 'porn' and related words that, as far as I can see, are designed to get around filters that are used to send crap e-mail like this to /dev/null.

You have to figure there are two basic reasons such filters are in place. First, because the e-mail recipient wants to filter his or her e-mail (duh!), and second, because the recipient is using a machine that is controlled by some third party (library, school, parent, boss) that filters content received on the system.

If the point of this 'creativity' is to defeat the first group, I have to ask: Why? Why shove unwanted crap into the inboxes of people who have taken a specific step to filter such stuff out? Is the sender figuring on a sudden change of heart on the part of such recipients, which will cause them to click on the proffered URL? C'mon!

If the point is to defeat the second group, I again have to ask: Why? While one might (I say again, might) make a case for defeating censorware in public terminals, say, at libraries, it makes no sense at all to try to slip your offer under the radar of parents or, worse yet, employers.

Then again, if this is worth getting worked up about, then so are forged headers, which is a subject for another rant.

Cheers...