Keeping my knees loose...

It was a quiet night at the MCC last night. In ran into some old acquaintances in the space-to-ground room, and we chatted a couple of times when I stopped by to get hot water for tea and one of the packaged noodle meals that we stock up on, from time to time, at the Hong Kong Market.

As I was going home, I approached the passenger side of the rental - a Ford - in order to open the door and put my bag on the floor (as opposed to hauling it into the car across my lap after sitting down behind the wheel) and was momentarily nonplused, as there were no keyholes on either of the passenger side doors. Going around to the driver's side, it turns out there is only one lock on the vehicle, which - I thought to myself - makes it really hard to be considerate in situations where you want to open the passenger's door before you open your own. (Naturally, the car is of that class where there is no remote locking control.)

I ate after coming home, which was probably a mistake, as I didn't really expect to stay up for very long afterward. I had an ersatz "surf and turf" dinner, consisting of the rest of the lamb and a piece of salmon, and some salad. I'll make sure to take something more substantial to eat to work tonight, so as to avoid the temptation to raid the fridge after getting home.

<freewheel>

Lately, I'm listening to a lot more audio - spoken words as opposed to music - and it makes me wonder if, as reading begins to take a back seat to video and audio, we're really not taking a major step backward here.

I was fortunate enough to develop reading skills as a kid, and although I'm not one of those speed-readers who can read a page at a glance, I can get through a "normal" sized fiction novel in about 3-4 hours. Furthermore, I find it's easier for me to understand things when they're written out as words, and to find them again when they're written out (one knack I've developed when reading mysteries is to be able to go back and find the passage with the foreshadowed clue after it has been revealed), and to refer back and forth between a printed page and any notes I care to take.

I'm not at all sure you can do that with an audio stream (although I know people are working on making spoken words "searchable"). On top of that, that same book I said would take me 3-4 hours to read comes as - and I'd have to confirm with a site visit - about 8-10 hours of audio (perhaps even abridged).

</freewheel>

No time to develop that properly, as I have about 2.5 hours to do some work in before getting ready for anothe (equally quiet, one can hope) night at MCC.

Cheers...

It's (not) late...

Usually, when I've been in this slot at the MCC for this long, it's about 5 or 6 in the morning, and I'm tired. Well, it's only a little after 10:30 pm, and I'm still tired. I think I only got about 6 hours of sleep last night.

I've managed to get the marketing words for various sawmill machines out of the way, which was an accomplishment because I spent entirely too much time trying to research the terminology; in the end, I relied heavily on the glossary provided by the client, as I could find no better terms. I've also managed to take care of three relatively small documents for my best client, which held my interest because they were by far the most withering comments I've translated in some time.

This leaves two relatively small documents for the morrow, to be done by the time I need to get ready to come into work again here at the MCC.

Oops! I've just been informed by the Russians I am supporting that they are calling it a night, and that I may consider myself to be released as of ten minutes from now. Time to boogie!

Cheers...