Increíble!...

There I was, listening to the second Spanish CD last night when Michel Thomas works his students up to the following:

¿Qué puede decirme de la situación política y económica en México hoy?

Which, if I perceive correctly, is: "What can you tell me about the political and economic situation in Mexico today?" (I realize I am missing a prepended inverted question mark; I am too lazy right now to figure out the HTML encoding for same. UPDATE: Figured it out; it's an &#191.)

I am far from capable of assessing the quality of the Spanish phrase, but it is a heck of a sentence for hour two of a beginner's course, no? Or are my standards too low?

Cheers...

Moving through molasses...

That's how I feel today, despite all that's going on.

Huntur came to visit today, and a fine time was had by all. I tried to play the Russian cartoons for her, and ended up interpreting what was going on for her. The cartoon we watched involved a young man named Timothy who ends up running away from home with a talking cat, and before I knew it, Huntur had slipped off the bed and was running around the house and ducking behind furniture. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Running away!" came the reply, with a laugh. This kid is so precious!

I had arranged yesterday with Diana B. to swap out the Sony CD drive in the machine I bought from her a while back with the DVD drive that was supposed to have bought with the machine. I removed the CD drive this morning and left it at the store to wait for Diana's arrival.

In place of the CD, I installed the second 30-GB hard drive that originally came with the machine (I'd replaced it with the 120-GB disk that had been lying around ever since I fried the Pentium-II machine) and then installed Mandrake Linux 9.2 on the new disk (the install CDs came with a copy of Linux Format magazine that I'd bought while in Houston). My heart skipped a beat when Mandrake got to the part where it installed the bootloader, as it didn't ask me a thing and simply did what it needed to do and went on to the next step of the installation process. Fortunately, the software did the right thing, so now I have a machine that is dual boot (in fact, this post is being written from the machine as it's running Linux).

This is the first time I have Linux installed on something with a little 'oomph!' behind the CPU (i.e., a clock rate higher than 1 GHz, despite the fact that it makes enough fan noise to require earplugs), and performance is nice.

Feht called a little while ago and sounded like death with a sore throat. It appears that he and Maria caught the bug that's been going around and Feht got it bad enough, apparently, to where the needle on his worry meter started to approach the red area. I've been fortunate, and hope to continue being fortunate.

Traveling to Houston this Friday, however, is probably goading Fate in that regard, but I'm going to take the place of a fellow interpreter who is, apparently, also a victim of the flu. After finishing off various paperwork and sending off all remaining invoices for the year (and thereby racking up a record-setting month, I might add), it will be nice to start the new year with an assignment that will allow me to invoice my "nut" for the month by the 15th (not to mention that I still have three documents in the queue for translation).

Now I just need to find a little time to review my performance for the year and formulate a new, simpler set of affirmations. (Actually, there was probably nothing wrong with the ones for 2003; the problem lay - as it usually does - with implementation, but more about that later.)

Cheers...

I'm reading it. and having trouble believing it...

From CNN.com:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.

In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."

It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways.

About the only way this makes sense is if the FBI knows for a cold hard fact that there's one particular almanac out there that needs to be found. Otherwise, the more I turn this around in my mind, the more I am convinced that this is a ploy to have Congress allocate emergency funds for anti-terror recruitment so that the idiots that promulgated this idiocy can be replaced, and quickly.

Ye gods.

Cheers...

You could have knocked me over with a feather...

...when I read the following headline at The Register:

Dead iBook owners take protest to MacWorld show

Yikes!

On the other tentacle, the Evening Standard reports that Apple is on the verge of announcing a new, smaller version of the iPod, which ought to retail for about $120 and will be able to store about 800 songs (this, via /.)

Wow.

Cheers...