Holmes' Law...

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

This bit of wisdom is repeated often in "the Canon" of works written by Arthur Conan Doyle about one Sherlock Holmes. It in fact came in handy during the past couple of days.

My late father was a stickler for order, particularly with items of technology. Combine this with my mother's natural propensity to never throw anything out, and the results are quite impressive (though it makes the question of why I can find no personal papers of my father's that much more intriguing, but I digress...).

Some years ago, my folks acquired a Compaq laptop and an HP LaserJet 3100, a printer/fax/sheet scanner that still works, though it's not USB enabled (indeed, when I had no USB-enabled printer available here, I would fax stuff to this LaserJet as a workaround). The thought recently crossed my mind that I could set up this printer and install it on a desktop machine that has an old-fashioned parallel port, but that I would need the installation disk to install the driver. (I'm not going to go check, but somewhere I got the impression that this software was no longer available from HP. I may be wrong. It doesn't matter.)

In any event, I methodically began to go through the "computer desk" the other night (which used to be my desk back in high school), and unearthed a frightening number of AOL CDs, printouts on how to do various things on the Internet, the CDs that came with the Compaq (which no longer works owing to some kind of video problem that would cost more to fix than to buy a new computer), and the CD case for the HP software, sans CD.

The fact that the CD was missing told me just one thing: it had to be still inside the Compaq. This had to be true because it would have been impossible for my dad to misplace the CD, and it wasn't in its case. One straightened paper clip maneuver later, I took the CD out of the Compaq and returned it to its case.

I must say, though, I both was and was not surprised at this outcome.

Cheers...

Getting a fire lit...

I found it profoundly difficult to get to work today, so I continued to deal with the bedlam of the move, and other issues, and only managed to finally sit down to work at around 4 pm, and reluctantly, at that. The document, due Monday morning, contains nearly 7,000 words, of which about 2,000 or so have been "pretranslated."

By 10 pm, thanks in part to the repetitive nature of the text, I had whittled the number of words left to translate down to below 1,000. Even the pretranslated text was "cooperative" in that, despite inconsistencies and a number of poor word choices, it has been manageable so far. I plan to finish the file tomorrow morning, as a warm-up exercise.

A built-in bookcase sits at the end of the den opposite to where I set up my work table. There are approximately 50 feet of shelving in the unit, if you don't count the top of the unit, which is about 17 feet long (and which I am trying to keep clear of stuff). So far, between my own books (not too many so far) and books of my parents that I'd like to keep, I have filled more than 2/3 of the shelving.

It's getting late. I should hit the sack. After the immediate document, I have another two documents in the hopper, due at the end of this coming week.

Cheers...