Miscellany...

According to Lee (and confirmed by the news), it looks like a piece of hurricane Ivan spun off back into the Gulf of Mexico and is currently on track to come ashore somewhat north of Galveston and then buttonhook around Houston over the next few days. The forecast calls for about 10 inches of rain, which is pretty nasty, but nowhere near as nasty as the approximately yard of rain that Allison produced back in June 2001. Too, a tropical storm and 25 cm of rain is nothing like the plastering the Florida has gotten, which is slated to continue under the supervision of the next great hurricane of the season, Jeanne. At any rate, I hope everyone stays safe and dry down in Texas and Florida.

* * *The various cartridges on the Epson printer are emptying with gratifying evenness. Unlike most color printers that I've owned, which incorporate all colors in one cartridge (forcing you to throw out perfectly good ink when one compartment runs dry), the Epson line uses individual color cartridges. The concept isn't perfect, as each Epson printer seems to use a cartridge that has the same form factor, but a different number, with the electronics in the printer smart enough to reject any cartridge with the wrong number, regardless of how well it fits.

My Stylus RX500 actually uses six cartridges: black, yellow, and two cartridges with different tones of cyan and magenta. The latter group is used ever so slightly when printing solid black text, for reasons I'm sure make sense to Epson's engineers, but which cost extra money in the long run.

One nice feature of the unit is the ability to plug in digital media. When you do that, the media is scanned for photo files and if you choose, you can then print out a page (or more) of thumbnails. The arrangement of the thumbnails is such that you can blacken in a circle under a particular photo, blacken in a size, and then scan the result using the printer's scanner. When you do this, the printer can figure out exactly which photo you are specifying (position of black circle on page, page code, etc.) and then accesses the media and does whatever is necessary to print the photo to the appropriate size. The output is very high quality. Neat-o!

* * *Owing to a number of factors that nibbled at my time throughout the day, and a natural laziness, I managed to not get much translation done today. If there is justice in the world, that means I'll be called tomorrow with an offer to translate a huge job over the weekend, transforming my schedule into utter bedlam. We'll see.

Cheers...