Cat! (again)...

For my own peace of mind, I shall have to make sure the cat is locked in the garage before I go to sleep. There is nothing quite so... frustrating as to have a cat meowing for all it is worth in the room with you, made all the more memorable by a certain soupçon of exotic esters in the air (if you get my drift).

So here I am, tired yet alert, in the middle of the night. Wunnerful.

I ended up with another 110% of my self-imposed quota done yesterday; the style of the source text makes it hard to really get into the mood, as it looks like a really rough draft - sentence fragments throughout - of something of interest only to a small group of people. Some might say such a job stinks - hey, it's a step up from talking about the cat's contribution in that area - but as far as I am concerned, work always smells to me like meat and potatoes.

Cheers...

One of those days...

You know, one of those days when that evil voice whispers in your ear and tells you there is plenty of time to catch up with work later, and that today, it is time to address that wretched, miserable collection of files one calls a "web site." Reviewing those pages, it would appear I haven't really paid much attention to them since, um, 2002.

The impetus for this effort started innocently enough. You see, I run a copy of Mediawiki on my Linux box, the better to keep track of the myriad "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" I am subjected to in day-to-day life. It turns out the 'skin' I use is the 'plain vanilla' deal that comes out of the box - or out of the .tar.gz file, at it turns out.

Very. Bo. Ring. Not to mention hard to read, as the main section of text stretches wa-a-a-y across the screen. (There is, after all, a reason why newsprint is arranged in fairly narrow columns.) So, there I was, with a promising technology that nevertheless provided me this humongoid piece of real estate in which to display entirely too great a span of text. Spend any more than a few minutes at this site, and your eyeballs will be ready to do a Guy Fawkes number on your brain. This meant either (a) narrowing the extent of the display, or (b) increasing the size of the text, or (c) both.

So I started to play around with the .css file that controls how things are displayed.

Now, I had heard that you can do some pretty interesting things, layout wise, with CSS (indeed, to the extent where the venerable HTML table can be retired for most purposes). But after a couple of false starts trying to step through more PHP code than I am capable of grokking at one time, it finally occurred to me that CSS gave me a lot more control over the layout than I suspected.

In short, whereas before I subscribed to the idea that you could drop tables in favor of CSS purely on an intellectual basis, today's little love-in with the default Mediawiki setup has served to make me a convert.

* * *This brings me to another sticking point, which is the ...application? ...expansion? ...whatever? of the company name under which I do business.

Someone sages wiser than I am once observed that virtually any company named "Joe Shmoe & Associates" has a better than even chance of being a one-person operation consisting of a certain "Joe Shmoe," and that's it. That was certainly true for a Colorado corporation I created back in the early 90s, and I knew it was true for a handful of other similarly named outfits as well.

When I moved back to Colorado in 2001, I created "Galexi Wordsmiths, LLC," with some idea of someday expanding it beyond my own personal efforts at marketing my translation and interpretation services. So far, the idea has remained unrealized.

Frankly, I didn't (and don't) want to create a run-of-the-mill translation agency, which typically carves out an existence by establishing a sort of master-slave relationship with freelancers. Indeed, there is a crying need for professional, experienced freelancers to somehow join forces... to do what? (If I can answer that question, and provide a perceptible benefit to such a cohort, then the company can expand.)

Several thoughts cross my mind here: What kinds of services could such an organization provide (and, on a related note, could such an organization charge for, at least to cover expenses)? The first thing off the top of my skull was "collections" (as in chasing down late payers and nonpayers), and there may actually be a market for this service, except that seems like such a negative base upon which to build any kind of positive structure. Cross-referrals with "agency" fees, based on the idea that members know each other well enough - either personally or by reputation (or by the fact membership?) - that they would feel comfortable in recommending other members?

Even more important: Could such an organization help foster a sense of professionalism that is not heavily oriented toward the academic tradition? (There are a number of folks out there who feel that professionalism is only properly demonstrated with degrees, publications, and presentations/attendance at seminars about translation; I personally think actually working at translation for a real-life client is no less important.)

But it's late, and my mind is mush. Perhaps I shall consign this little freewheel to the background, while I sleep.

Cheers...