Got the call...

Closing is Monday at 2 pm at some title company. This is a Good Thing™.

Another good thing is it being love337's birthday. Happy 23rd, kiddo!

I wasted disproportionate amounts of time editing two short translations this morning. Besides absolutely horrid, inconceivable formatting, the client's glossary is spread out among several files, keeps growing, and is wholly out of hand as far as usage is concerned.

Compartmentalization of linguistic knowledge is a Bad Thing™. Why is it so hard to comprehend the difficulty involved in having to potentially look things up in three or four different places, as opposed to one place (even if looking in that one place might involve several hits)?

Anyway, the weather report says we're going to get dumped on this weekend. Let it snow, I say.

As long as we can get out of the driveway on Monday. :^)

Cheers...

Computer goings-on...

My Windows 2K box has had a problem with its sound card ever since I got the unit. Specifically, no driver was installed during the initial configuration of the system. And it may reflect the fact that I'm slowly becoming more comfortable working in Linux, but I could swear that Windows seems to not be very interested in giving up any details about the hardware, which makes the search for driver software, um, a tad difficult.

So, I rebooted the machine to run Mandrake Linux 9.2 and selected the sound card in the configuration applet. Bang! Within about 5 seconds, I knew I was dealing with a VIA VT8233 AC97 audio controller.

That alphanumeric soup means little to me, but inserting it into a Google search yielded a number of hits to places that had the requisite files. Interestingly, when I visited the site of the vendor whose splash screen is displayed on my monitor during startup and downloaded that vendor's files, they did not seem to do the trick (Windows coughed and belched, and said, in effect: "Anytime you're ready, fella, tell me where the real files are.")

So I went back and downloaded a different set of files from the manufacturer and did the installation two-step again, and voilá! I now have a sound capability on gagarin.

* * *In the meantime, I tried to find out more about where the recovery files were on the VAIO. In the process, I found out that the DVD drive will allow me to change the "region" setting up to four times, after which the unit will be stuck on whatever the setting is for all the rest of eternity. This is, I suppose, some kind of acknowledgment that not everyone in the world who might use a VAIO is going to watch "Region 1" DVDs, and also a nod to the "entertainment" industry, which apparently feels that everyone, deep down, should pledge allegiance to only one region.

The regionalization of DVDs is often portrayed by the "entertainment" industry as a means of foiling the premature distribution of products across borders when movie X is released, say, in country A but not country B. What baloney. Unless I miss my guess, it is the most heartfelt desire of every budding mogul to release films simultaneously to a worldwide audience (think: "We want our money - which is temporarily in your pocket - now!" multipled by however many markets there are in the world).

In actuality, I think the real argument for "regionalization" is more along the lines of: "We don't want less expensive versions of products to undercut sales of those same products being sold at much higher prices in other countries, such as the U.S." In fact, I'd be surprised if the reasoning wasn't exclusively so.

A side effect of this policy is to impede the broadening of educational and cultural horizons, since DVDs from other countries end up generally costing two or more times as much as their already overpriced Region 1 cousins, and thus basically inaccessible to ordinary folks. I suspect this is due to additional costs associated with manufacturers having to press and (probably more important) keep track of a separate SKU, and then retailers hiking the price to cover having to handle low-demand items (made even more low demand by the high price).

Then again, I suspect that this is not something that even shows up on the radar of most people (I wonder how many people, given the opportunity, would routinely opt for something "exotic and foreign" from Blockbuster, so as to broaden their purview) or most certainly, the "entertainment" conglomerates (who want you to buy the same dreck everyone else is buying and who cares about anything else?).

But I'm

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