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Sunday update...
Feb. 19th, 2006 03:34 pmI've got various projects going on in the background, while I'm translating.
For a while, now, the battery on VAIO seems to have been taking more time to charge and less time to discharge. Although the conventional wisdom for lithium-ion batteries is not to "exercise" them by doing a series of deep discharges (which is recommended for nickel-cadmium batteries), I decided that a few charge-discharge cycles couldn't really hurt, as the battery was approaching a condition where it would serve as a 5-minute UPS in case the mains went out.
After four discharge cycles, I'm of the opinion that it's taking less time to charge and longer to discharge. (As I'm not in the room with the unit all the time, I haven't been keeping records. There are no numbers, so this ain't science.)
* * * Talking about science, an interesting item on digg.com pointed me at a Belgian video featuring an archaeologist who claimed to have recovered some inadvertent "audio" on the side of an ancient clay pot. The way that would work, you see, is that as the pottery was rotating and being worked by a long metal tool, the ambient vibrations in the air - say, from someone speaking or laughing - would cause the tip of the tool of vibrate sympathetically, thus leaving a rough "audio" track in the clay on the side of the pot.
The segment is about two minutes long, very well made, very authoritative-sounding, and a marvelous April Fool joke from 2005. It certainly had me going, until I stopped to really think about the feasibility of what they were trying to sell.
Speaking of jokes, I recharged my Contax camera to take some photos the other day, and found that some earlier photos had never gotten out of the camera's memory. One of those was a shot I took at the pizzeria near my parents' house during my trips to New York late last year.
What's wrong with this picture?
I've heard of quenching one's thirst, but never of refreshing one's thirst. Thinking that this might be yet another example of a word gone bad due to lazy thinking and societal pressure (here I usually point at words like "bimonthly," which now is defined to mean either "once every two months" or "twice a month," making the word kinda... useless, but I digress...), I glanced in the dictionary and no, the verb "to refresh" still has the general meaning of to restore, to revive, to replenish, to stimulate, and so on.
So I ask again: why in the name of Daniel Webster would one want to "refresh" one's thirst? (Or is Coke finally admitting the truth of what our parents said about how consuming carbonated beverages just makes you more thirsty?)
* * * In other news, I finally had an opportunity (and a need) to fire up a program called MultiTerm Extract, which supposedly does a fine job of finding and "extracting" candidate terminology, even from monolingual documents.
Although I installed the software when I bought it, today, I couldn't find a critical part of it (er, the bit that actually does the extraction).
In turns out it wasn't installed by the default setup program settings. (Whisky Tango Foxtrot?)
Once I did get the program installed, it told me that I was entitled to use it only in demo mode, as no license file had been found. Clicking on the "license manager" for the product line informed me of all the various and sundry applications I was licensed to use, but the key application - the extractor - was absent from the list.
So, I went online to the site that the publisher uses for distributing the software, and found that, indeed, I had never applied for a separate license for the application I was trying to use. To apply, all I had to do was download a special "ID generator" and decide whether I wanted to key my one-and-only installation to my machine's hard drive or to its Ethernet card.
Grumbling, and thinking that the company's old "dongle" system had its good points, as well as bad, I decided on the latter. (After all, if push comes to shove, I can probably transplant a network card from one machine to another if the hard disk dies.)
Anyway, the ID generator came up with a number for the card, which I fed to the company's web server via my browser. After a moment, the browser made available a license file good for my desktop (i.e., the machine with a certain Ethernet card in it).
A little later, out of curiousity I ran ipconfig /all on my machine, to see whether there was any correlation between the embedded physical address of my network card and the number spit out by the ID generator.
Of course there was.
It was exactly the physical address, and the ID generator even disgorged it in hexadecimal!
But it was the address of my Bluetooth dongle!
Gee, I wonder if that means I can... nah!... Do you think?
Post scriptum: The bleeding program keeps throwing an error when it tries to read Word files. No explanation, of course, and the help file is not living up to its name. Drat!
* * * The first cable I soldered together for my CVS "one-time use" video camera worked one or two times while I was in Kazakhstan, and actually allowed me to download the contents of my camera once, but somewhere along the line, electrical contact was lost through one of the data lines, and nothing I did would cause my computers to recognize the device. So, I disassembled the camera to the point where I could get at the contact pads with my soldering iron. The result:
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having a hot soldering iron when attempting something like this, because lower temperatures help assure poor connection (as I found out to my chagrin after reassembling the camera, whereupon one of the soldered connections came apart as if it was spring-loaded).
Okay! Now that I've gotten that out of my system, back to work!
Cheers...
For a while, now, the battery on VAIO seems to have been taking more time to charge and less time to discharge. Although the conventional wisdom for lithium-ion batteries is not to "exercise" them by doing a series of deep discharges (which is recommended for nickel-cadmium batteries), I decided that a few charge-discharge cycles couldn't really hurt, as the battery was approaching a condition where it would serve as a 5-minute UPS in case the mains went out.
After four discharge cycles, I'm of the opinion that it's taking less time to charge and longer to discharge. (As I'm not in the room with the unit all the time, I haven't been keeping records. There are no numbers, so this ain't science.)
The segment is about two minutes long, very well made, very authoritative-sounding, and a marvelous April Fool joke from 2005. It certainly had me going, until I stopped to really think about the feasibility of what they were trying to sell.
Speaking of jokes, I recharged my Contax camera to take some photos the other day, and found that some earlier photos had never gotten out of the camera's memory. One of those was a shot I took at the pizzeria near my parents' house during my trips to New York late last year.
What's wrong with this picture?
I've heard of quenching one's thirst, but never of refreshing one's thirst. Thinking that this might be yet another example of a word gone bad due to lazy thinking and societal pressure (here I usually point at words like "bimonthly," which now is defined to mean either "once every two months" or "twice a month," making the word kinda... useless, but I digress...), I glanced in the dictionary and no, the verb "to refresh" still has the general meaning of to restore, to revive, to replenish, to stimulate, and so on.
So I ask again: why in the name of Daniel Webster would one want to "refresh" one's thirst? (Or is Coke finally admitting the truth of what our parents said about how consuming carbonated beverages just makes you more thirsty?)
Although I installed the software when I bought it, today, I couldn't find a critical part of it (er, the bit that actually does the extraction).
In turns out it wasn't installed by the default setup program settings. (Whisky Tango Foxtrot?)
Once I did get the program installed, it told me that I was entitled to use it only in demo mode, as no license file had been found. Clicking on the "license manager" for the product line informed me of all the various and sundry applications I was licensed to use, but the key application - the extractor - was absent from the list.
So, I went online to the site that the publisher uses for distributing the software, and found that, indeed, I had never applied for a separate license for the application I was trying to use. To apply, all I had to do was download a special "ID generator" and decide whether I wanted to key my one-and-only installation to my machine's hard drive or to its Ethernet card.
Grumbling, and thinking that the company's old "dongle" system had its good points, as well as bad, I decided on the latter. (After all, if push comes to shove, I can probably transplant a network card from one machine to another if the hard disk dies.)
Anyway, the ID generator came up with a number for the card, which I fed to the company's web server via my browser. After a moment, the browser made available a license file good for my desktop (i.e., the machine with a certain Ethernet card in it).
A little later, out of curiousity I ran ipconfig /all on my machine, to see whether there was any correlation between the embedded physical address of my network card and the number spit out by the ID generator.
Of course there was.
It was exactly the physical address, and the ID generator even disgorged it in hexadecimal!
But it was the address of my Bluetooth dongle!
Gee, I wonder if that means I can... nah!... Do you think?
Post scriptum: The bleeding program keeps throwing an error when it tries to read Word files. No explanation, of course, and the help file is not living up to its name. Drat!
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having a hot soldering iron when attempting something like this, because lower temperatures help assure poor connection (as I found out to my chagrin after reassembling the camera, whereupon one of the soldered connections came apart as if it was spring-loaded).
Okay! Now that I've gotten that out of my system, back to work!
Cheers...
