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Fighting it...
May. 4th, 2006 10:01 pmAside from it being my son's birthday, there was little else to recommend the day. The fact that the monthly payments hit mostly tomorrow while the account the money is to be drawn from is doing a passable imitation of Mother Hubbard's cupboard sort of set the standard for the day.
I got no response to my offer to do part of the large railroad assignment at the lower rate, and my offer to do any of yet another was put on hold pending client approval. As I mentioned to my correspondent, I hope that every day of delay on the client's side doesn't erode the already tight deadline, but privately I'm not holding my breath.
After all, I've had clients who start out with an intellectual and emotional understanding that several hundred pages of safety-critical documentation requires a certain amount of time to translate correctly, only to see that time erode as the originators of the documentation kept delaying its release (because it hadn't been written yet), to the point where, once it was released, our deadline stood at, literally, 48 hours to complete the lot, and our client in the kind of denial that you only associate with substance abusers.
Then again, that was an extreme case. Most clients are well aware that assigning one page each to 100 translators doesn't mean you can translate a 100-page document in about an hour, even if said client is not completely aware of what kind of true Stratofroodling firedrill such a move is guaranteed to be.
Speaking of Stratofroodling firedrills, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority appears to have embraced machine translation as the one-stop, low-cost solution to dealing with non-English-speaking customers. More on this in a later post.
Despite the hour, Feht is rolling in this direction to pick up a CD of a 128-MB client file I am currently downloading for him. His so-called ISP limits his downloads to 100 MB over some unknown time interval, which is unfortunate. Then again, given the current momentum to tranfer as much control over our online lives as possible to The Powers That Be, maybe his is the forward-looking ISP of the future.
The flash on my Canon PowerShot A20 misfired during the farewell dinner, and I didn't stop to think about it at the time, but now it's clear: the flash has stopped working, although as long as no flash is required, the camera seems otherwise okay. I'm not sure when I bought the unit, but it was in Pearland, at a going-out-of-business sale of the K-Mart down the road from our old house (I'd say sometime in 2002). Not a bad run.
Download is done. Time to create a CD.
Cheers...
I got no response to my offer to do part of the large railroad assignment at the lower rate, and my offer to do any of yet another was put on hold pending client approval. As I mentioned to my correspondent, I hope that every day of delay on the client's side doesn't erode the already tight deadline, but privately I'm not holding my breath.
After all, I've had clients who start out with an intellectual and emotional understanding that several hundred pages of safety-critical documentation requires a certain amount of time to translate correctly, only to see that time erode as the originators of the documentation kept delaying its release (because it hadn't been written yet), to the point where, once it was released, our deadline stood at, literally, 48 hours to complete the lot, and our client in the kind of denial that you only associate with substance abusers.
Then again, that was an extreme case. Most clients are well aware that assigning one page each to 100 translators doesn't mean you can translate a 100-page document in about an hour, even if said client is not completely aware of what kind of true Stratofroodling firedrill such a move is guaranteed to be.
Speaking of Stratofroodling firedrills, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority appears to have embraced machine translation as the one-stop, low-cost solution to dealing with non-English-speaking customers. More on this in a later post.
Despite the hour, Feht is rolling in this direction to pick up a CD of a 128-MB client file I am currently downloading for him. His so-called ISP limits his downloads to 100 MB over some unknown time interval, which is unfortunate. Then again, given the current momentum to tranfer as much control over our online lives as possible to The Powers That Be, maybe his is the forward-looking ISP of the future.
The flash on my Canon PowerShot A20 misfired during the farewell dinner, and I didn't stop to think about it at the time, but now it's clear: the flash has stopped working, although as long as no flash is required, the camera seems otherwise okay. I'm not sure when I bought the unit, but it was in Pearland, at a going-out-of-business sale of the K-Mart down the road from our old house (I'd say sometime in 2002). Not a bad run.
Download is done. Time to create a CD.
Cheers...
