Another exciting day...

And it only just now started to wind down.

It is, of course, a bad thing to speak of there being "too much business" at the store. If the past couple of years have been any indication, the post-holiday season sees a slump that doesn't go away until Easter or so. Personally, I haven't exactly seen much of a recovery at Easter, but it's been pretty busy the past couple of days. Today, in fact, we sent out more UPS packages than yesterday.

Yet I got more time "off" during the day today than yesterday. Unfortunately, I spent that time on maintenance issues (among which is the issue of very limited mail throughout the day... I suspect an ISP problem, but in the final analysis, it doesn't matter where the bottleneck is... I'm not getting mail, including several test messages I've sent to myself.)

When I got out of the store, I was so tired I had to take a nap. I rose at 6:30 and started 15 minutes later. Despite there being not much repetition in the text, I managed to zip right through it. There was so much math in the text, I felt a little as if I were doing a translation for Plenum, except for the absence of what was called 'the five-dot convention," which allowed translators to replace non-Latin expressions with ".....", which resulted in Sentences such as:

If we consider ....., then ..... and ..... owing to ....., ....., and ..... .

Now, however, we end up with true masterpieces, such as:

The pressure p at points lying above the design water level (z < 0), is determined for C > 0 using a linear law between p at C = 0, which is determined using Eq. (66b)*, and p = 0 at z = -Ch; while for points at a depth of 0 < z < -Ch, a linear law is similarly used for C < 0 between p = 0 at z = 0 and p, determined using Eq. (66b)* at z = -Ch.

Ye gods. Thank goodness for cut and paste.

* * *In any event, I think I am going to noodle just a bit more with the translation, and then hit the hay. Of particular curiosity is the difference between прибойные волны and разбивающихся волны. And while I'm noodling, it'd also be good to figure out what разрушающихся волны are, too.

The problem is that most of the Russian sources I've found on the Internet are not technical and seem to use the first two pretty much interchangeably for what are commonly understood to be "breakers" (i.e., waves that curl up and fall over as they approach a shore). However, on the English side of the Internet, I found several references to different types of breakers, specifically:

• Spilling breakers, which are formed by incident waves of relatively large steepness traveling over gently sloping beaches. These waves break gradually and the process occurs over a large distance.
  
• Surging breakers, which occur when low steepness waves break on steep beaches. These breakers peak as if they are about to break, and then surge up the beach face.
  
• Plunging breakers, which occur when the forward face of the wave becomes steep and the wave crest curls over and plunges into the trough.

I am convinced that прибойные волны and разбивающихся волны are among these types. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of doing the math in the document to figure out clues as to which is which. A figure at the end of the section I translated suggests that прибойные волны are plunging breakers. This would then suggest that разбивающихся волны are spilling breakers.

Criminy, it's almost midnight... this fun will have to wait until morning.

Cheers...