Sleepless in Pagosa...

There is one majorly bad thing about falling asleep around 4:30 pm after just having returned from overseas: any sleep you get only works to keep you from readjusting your wake-sleep cycle back to normal. This, despite a tickling in my throat that doesn't want to go away.

In the meantime, I got to wondering how I might be able to embed a Freemind mindmap file in a wiki (and specifically, at my MediaWiki, which has replaced my TWiki installation at springsboard.com). It turns out there is a mechanism to write extensions, and it is so glaringly simple that even someone who's been away from programming for as long as I have can grok it fairly quickly. In fact, as sleep was eluding me, I wrote and documented an extension to do exactly what I wanted and posted the result on the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki site.

My embedded mindmap is here.

Now, I'm thinking I may have to force myself to go to sleep.

Cheers...

Morning conversation...

I am at the store, having opened it this morning after a largely sleepless night, the high point of which was watching Bogie and Bacall in Key Largo as the sun came up. My first telephone conversation after unlocking the door this morning went like this:

r-r-r-ring!

"Good morning, Pack N Mail Plus!"

"Oh, this isn't the post office?"

"Ma'am, we're a contract postal station. I can give you the phone number of the main post office downtown, if you like."

"Oh, no, that's not necessary. I have that number."

click!

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

I put the phone down on my end and decided I needed more coffee; it seems to help my sore throat.

Cheers...

Gotta love those agencies...

For laughs, I dropped in at the Proz.com site, only to find a job posting that starts off with a SCREAMING HEADLINE about how urgent the work is, and then uses the well-worn promise of incredible volume - to appear later on, naturally - to conclude: "Considering the huge volume involved, we will not go higher than 0.04 USD per word."

Hello? Anybody home?

Throw in that they're looking for native English speakers (without specifying American or British variants) who can prove their skill and reliability and can work to an initial deadline of 5,000 words for this Tuesday, and it's really a classic case of wanting the job done fast, cheap, and well (which conventional wisdom indicates is one too many).

I pity the poor client, because when push comes to shove, the only two readily measurable factors are time and cost, leaving quality twisting slowly in the breeze.

The thought has briefly crossed my mind of trying to slip a machine translation past one of the managers of such a project, and although the exercise might be interesting, if just to gauge the reaction (if any), I don't think I could bring myself to do it.

Cheers...