A wild, WILD guess!

In doing the final check of my latest assignment, I ran across that sentence again (from Saturday's post, I didn't stop...).

I wondered if, perhaps, градиент (gradient) might be a typo. I wondered if there was such a Russian word as инградиент, which sounds an awful lot like "ingredient," which would make the sentence actually make sense.

By golly, there is.

I didn't know that.

So here's the final version of the sentence:

In order to improve laundry quality, the work place is stocked with highly efficient powder detergents and ingredients for water treatment, laundry softening, and giving laundry a natural fresh smell.

And that, now, is definitely the last word on the subject.

Cheers...

End of the month...

One last assignment for March came in around 6 pm, for tomorrow morning. It was supposed to have come in earlier in the day, but for some reason didn't. That was okay, as it gave me an opportunity to finish the thing I worked on over the weekend.

Financially, March came in like a ghost and went out like... well... it's better than getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Over the past week, I invoiced twice what I did for the rest of the month.

The upside to the month was that I was able to take it easy a bit, albeit that would have been easier to do if there was a larger buffer in the bank. It also provoked me to make a couple of cold calls on prospective clients, which now has me working on a 'script' for future calls.

The whole idea of a 'script', of course, is to practice it to the point where you feel completely comfortable with it... something of that sort happened to me while I was working at Borland. I became so immersed in the marketing side of the business, that I could handle any turn of the conversation if the subject turned to C++ or debugging.

It's all a matter of repetition and comfort level with what you are saying.

* * *Bill Whittle has published another powerful essay on his blog, Eject! Eject! Eject!. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, of course, but I found it moving... and shocking, like a barrel of ice water over your head.

Consider this excerpt from the essay, titled History:

This war is an abject and utter failure. What everyone thought would be a quick, decisive victory has turned into an embarrassing series of reversals. The enemy, -- a ragtag, badly-fed collection of hotheads and fanatics – has failed to be shocked and awed by the most magnificent military machine ever fielded. Their dogged resistance has shown us the futility of the idea that a nation of millions could ever be subjugated and administered, no matter what obscene price we are willing to pay in blood and money.

The President of the United States is a buffoon, an idiot, a man barely able to speak the English language. His vice president is a little-seen, widely despised enigma and his chief military advisor a wild-eyed warmonger. Only his Secretary of State offers any hope of redemption, for he at least is a reasonable, well-educated man, a man most thought would have made a far, far better choice for Chief Executive.

We must face the fact that we had no business forcing this unjust war on a people who simply want to be left alone. It has damaged our international relationships beyond any measure, and has proven to be illegal, immoral and nothing less than a monumental mistake that will take generations to rectify. We can never hope to subdue and remake an entire nation of millions. All we will do is alienate them further. So we must bring this war to an immediate end, and make a solemn promise to history that we will never launch another war of aggression and preemption again, so help us God.

So spoke the American press. The time was the summer of 1864.

Whittle's descriptions of some Civil War battles verge on bone-chilling, as in this excerpt, where he describes a stop on a personal pilgrimage to several battlefields of that conflict:

As I walked from the Confederate to the Union positions, the green pine forest was as peaceful and serene a place as is possible to imagine. And there I stopped, halfway between the lines, listening to the winter breeze swaying the trees, and looked around – at nothing. Just a glade like any other in the beautiful back woods of Virginia. And yet here lay seven thousand men – here, in this little clearing. Seven thousand men. The Union blue lay so thick on this ground that you could walk from the Confederate lines to the Union ones on the backs of the dead, your feet never touching the grass.

You can see them, you know. Not that I believe in ghosts, or the occult. But when you stand on a field like that, in a place like that, with a name like that – Cold Harbor – you feel it. You feel the reality of it. This happened, and it happened right here. The history of that ground rises like a vapor and grabs your imagination by the neck, and forces you to see what happened there.

An amazing essay.

Cheers...