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First day jitters...
Nov. 14th, 2005 10:30 pmI led off the interpretation at today's meeting and felt I did poorly in the first hour of the meeting, which is not all that unusual. The typical scenario is for me to really hit my stride by day two, once I've become used to speaking Russian again. However, I managed to get my tongue wrapped around my teeth correctly in the afternoon, when the discussion turned technical.
A client called and asked me - very insistently, I might add - to edit a translation of a PowerPoint presentation. I took the job against my better judgment, and lived to regret it. First of all, the presentation arrived as a PDF file. Yuk! Second, without a printer, it's really hard to edit a document by flipping back and forth between Adobe Acrobat and Word on a smallish laptop screen, even if you arrange the apps so each occupies half a screen (all of the menu bars, status bars, and other border material just eats up too much real estate).
I suppose I could have faxed it to myself here at the hotel (a useful expedient, at times), but my experience with fax conversion of tables where the print is black on a blue background into stark black-and-white has been less than stellar, and I'm not really sure how to edit a blue background out in a PDF. I got the job done eventually, and sent it back just a few minutes ago. The project manager assured me the translator was good; maybe he is, but he's careless.
Hooking into the free wireless here at the hotel has me jumpy. With my default laptop setup, it turns out the poor thing couldn't talk to the world because the gateway wouldn't identify itself. Finally, a couple of hours ago, I had to call the hotel's tech support line, during which we made so many changes to my computer's config (that, hopefully, I manged to correctly write down so I can reverse them when I leave) that I'm really nervous (especially the part where I had to shut down my laptop's Firewall From Hell™ (Outpost) to make/let things work.
Off to relax a few minutes, after which I have to get some shuteye. Galina is coming down tomorrow evening, in preparation for a departure on Wednesday morning for Moscow to visit her family.
Cheers...
A client called and asked me - very insistently, I might add - to edit a translation of a PowerPoint presentation. I took the job against my better judgment, and lived to regret it. First of all, the presentation arrived as a PDF file. Yuk! Second, without a printer, it's really hard to edit a document by flipping back and forth between Adobe Acrobat and Word on a smallish laptop screen, even if you arrange the apps so each occupies half a screen (all of the menu bars, status bars, and other border material just eats up too much real estate).
I suppose I could have faxed it to myself here at the hotel (a useful expedient, at times), but my experience with fax conversion of tables where the print is black on a blue background into stark black-and-white has been less than stellar, and I'm not really sure how to edit a blue background out in a PDF. I got the job done eventually, and sent it back just a few minutes ago. The project manager assured me the translator was good; maybe he is, but he's careless.
Hooking into the free wireless here at the hotel has me jumpy. With my default laptop setup, it turns out the poor thing couldn't talk to the world because the gateway wouldn't identify itself. Finally, a couple of hours ago, I had to call the hotel's tech support line, during which we made so many changes to my computer's config (that, hopefully, I manged to correctly write down so I can reverse them when I leave) that I'm really nervous (especially the part where I had to shut down my laptop's Firewall From Hell™ (Outpost) to make/let things work.
Off to relax a few minutes, after which I have to get some shuteye. Galina is coming down tomorrow evening, in preparation for a departure on Wednesday morning for Moscow to visit her family.
Cheers...
