Tasmanian Devil's got nothin' on me...

I didn't manage to fall asleep until early morning again, and even watching an awful SciFi Channel telecast of something called Alien Apocalypse (which made Riverworld look like an Oscar contender by comparison) wasn't enough to bore me into unconsciousness.

Checking over the acoustics translation this morning, it turns out I translated closer to 4700 words yesterday, which truly amazes me. It didn't feel like a 4700 word day.

A couple of funny-neutral (as opposed to funny-good or funny-bad) notes about my checking the work this morning:

The first was the following, um, interesting typo:

The latter was sued as a reference during the experiment.

(Heh. Of course, it should be "used.")

The second was a very erratic sentence in translation that somehow got juxtaposed with something Completely Different™. (When using Trados or Wordfast, you work with source and translation "segments" that are displayed on the screen in fields of different colors, and in this case, the translation made no sense at all. It was just a good thing I was checking!) The only explanation that comes to mind is some kind of momentary distraction on my part, causing me to accept a suggested less-than-100-percent-match translation when there was no justification for doing so.

So it's a little after 11 am, which leaves me just under 4 hours to check the accounting document. I don't really think it will take that long, but I am going to go through the text with a fine tooth comb.

There's 5000 source words on the plate after that, with a handful of figures (but nothing like what I was faced with last night!), but I'll probably start on that job later tonight or tomorrow.

Cheers...

So, how's this work again?

Thanks for your attention.

Cheers...

P.S. And yes, my head is about to explode from checking the accounting translation. "...At the completion of fixed asset fit-out, retooling, renovation, or upgrade, expenses posted to the non-current asset investment account either increase the historical cost of the fixed asset and are written off as a debit to the fixed asset account or are posted separately to the fixed asset account, in which case, a separate inventory card is created in the amount of the incurred expenses..." But it's looking pretty good, if I say so myself.

Stop the madness...

There's a report on cnn.com to the effect that Congress is considering extending daylight savings time.

Lawmakers crafting energy legislation approved an amendment Wednesday to extend daylight-saving time by two months, having it start on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday in November.

"Extending daylight-saving time makes sense, especially with skyrocketing energy costs," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, who along with Rep. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, co-sponsored the measure.

The projected savings, based on a Transportation Department estimate, is 10,000 barrels per day, for a nation that consumes 20 million barrels per day.

As is usual with such news, there's not enough information to understand whether the Transportation estimate confines itself narrowly to gross electricity savings or whether it attempts a net estimate.

For example, a post on Slashdot wonders how long it would take for the alleged energy savings to overcome the cost to make, test, and deploy the necessary code changes you'd have to make to software to make computers automatically reflect the correct time?

And I'm wondering if anyone has ever done a study of the cost associated with the mismatched shift between Savings Time (here) and Summer Time (in Europe) during the one week when Europe has already shifted and we haven't, and how such a study might extrapolate to the proposed two-month mismatch.

However, such concerns are beside the point, in my opinion. As much as 10,000 barrels a day is a pile of barrels that I'd notice sitting in my back yard on any given afternoon, the fact that the proposed change is estimated to reduce consumption by a whole one-twentieth of one percent (in a real world where nobody - much less a government agency - is capable of such accuracy) tells me that the effort being spent in Congress to push this measure and the effort - however weak - made to report on it will already outweigh its purported benefits.

At any rate, a similar measure that did pass back during the oil problems of the 70s was eventually repealed. I wonder why, if the extension of DST was such a good idea?

Putting it in personal terms, if you make $40,000 per year, how seriously would you consider commiting to a proposal that might save you $20 at the cost of some guaranteed additional inconvenience?

Cheers...