Flailing in the dark...

My contribution to the enormous pile of birthday loot in Huntur's bedroom is a modest DVD I bought in Russia, titled (in Russian, of course) The Golden Collection of Best-Loved Cartoons. It is one small attempt to inject some Russian into the kid's life. My instructions to Drew and Shannon were to have Huntur watch the thing until the bits on the DVD wear out, but I have my doubts.

Yesterday when Galina and I went over to their place, I took Huntur for one of our usual "strolls," where Huntur gets strapped into a stroller in a manner most test pilots would envy, while I push the stroller around the block. It's not the idea setup, as we don't get to look at one another as we walk, but it's better than nothing.

I speak Russian as we talk, mostly about what's happening around us. ("Oh, look at the car! What color is the car? The car is blue. What's the car doing? It's turning! What direction is it turning? Left! Oh, the car is gone!") Hunter doesn't say much when I go off on such rambles. (I wonder what she might be thinking? Has the old man gone completely off his nut?)

I also ask questions, first in English and then in Russian, using the same intonation. If she answers "Yah," I coach her to say "Да"; if the answer is "No," I coach her to say "Нет."

Yesterday, at about the 3/4 mark of our walk, Huntur volunteered what is for her a mouthful: "My house." Indeed, we had come into view of the kids' place. So, for the rest of the walk, I coached her to say "Мой дом" (which she pronounced very well... sure, it's only two syllables, but still...). She even managed to say it in front of daddy, which brought a smile to his face.

I suppose the more "face time" I spend with Huntur like this the better, but I feel intuitively that there is some threshold of interaction below which nothing really happens. (Evidently, that threshold was not reached in interacting with my own kids, as their comprehension is minimal... except, it seems, when they are the subject of the conversation.)

Time to turn to the next article in line. Once I finish this one, I can actually spend a day to check them all over and get ready for the 94-page monster that is the bulk of the project.

Cheers...

Milestone!

The articles have all been translated, except for the review and the inclusion of illustrations. Thank goodness the references cited at the ends of the articles are fairly sparse; there are only so many entries I can do whose titles resemble Some ways of trying to avoid implicitness in the numerical solution of stiff systems of ordinary differential equations. Ye gods.

Interestingly enough, my initial estimates for the word count on these articles were all off, and low. The closest I got was in estimating 800 words for an article that actually weighed in at around 1181 words. (Not true. The article I estimated at 3000 words actually translated into about 3100 words.) At the other end, both articles I estimated at 1800 words came in at over 2800 words, and what I thought would be a 3100 word job turned out to be 4200 words long. I am fortunate that my client did a preliminary word count for me.

In any event, all that adds up to just over 14000 words, plus time to be charged for working with the Microsoft equation editor.

I am beginning to think that 60K may have to be renamed, as there is no way that there can be anything approaching 500 translated words per page on the large document, even given my lousy track record for the first part of the job.

Then again, I recall the client saying that there were between 40K and 60K words in the job.

So I guess the number is probably closer to the former than the latter.

I have received a job due after this one. It's a PDF file and I set FineReader 6.0 the task of scanning it directly from the PDF. It seems to do a bang-up job, except for some of the math (I'm not talking about difficulties recognizing Greek letters, that's the result of my failing to include Greek as a recognition language; I'm talking here about superscripts and things such as the "plus or minus" sign). So it looks like I'll have a file to work on using, say, Trados (which reminds me, I need to install the upgrade and do what's needed to upgrade my dongle).

I found the folder with the closing papers for the store and got them to the accountant. Now I need to find some bank statements. Slowly, slowly, but we're getting there.

It seems like a fine time for a nap.

Cheers...

Musings...

A full page of the big document is less than 300 words (sample size: 1 page), which says there oughta be around 27000 words in this document, which added to the 14000 words done does just about make the lower limit of 40000 words advertised for the job. I'm not that sorry that this isn't going to be a 60K job, since all matrices and no time off make AlexPGP a dull boy.

I just finished 4 pages of the big document fairly quickly (one page, with a block diagram, took some time because of the graphics work, but that's factored into the job), which means that I might even be able to finish this document in a week (13 pages a day x 7 days), or maybe faster, which will be far in advance of my deadline and will allow me to commence on my next job.

* * *I have begun to gradually move pages from my "personal" web site into topics at the Springsboard TWiki. This is somewhat confusing to me at this point, as I really don't know what I want to do with the site, or to be more exact: what I want - as demonstrated by my actions - is wildly contradictory. I would like to use the TWiki capability to house my personal pages and act as my personal scrapbook, but I also want the site not to look like my own personal playground (which it obviously strongly does right now).

Now, part of the site's somewhat lopsided appearance (virtually all new content has been contributed by me) is simply due to my wanting to create some kind of "core" material that might spark some collaboration down the road some day, and that's okay. But I'm increasingly getting the feeling that I'm going to have to strictly divide my personal items from the more general items and soon, before the site looks like a complete Keystone Kops fire drill.

Hmmm. That might work. I could create a strictly "personal" web within the TWiki that is not listed among the webs available to the casual user/visitor. (Not that I'd be trying to keep it a deep, dark secret, only that I wouldn't want to smack people in the face with it all the time.)

Then, I could have a link on my "user" web home page that points to that "personal" web (as well as a separate entry page). In this way, I can have topics within the "personal" web (e.g., my draw against Boris Spassky) that aren't of particular general interest, as well as links to topics in the various other webs at the site that I do want to have available to users/visitors. Moreover, the non-personal ("collaborative"?) part of the TWiki would not have so strong of a personal flavor.

Now, only to find time to do this.

Cheers...