Maybe there's instructions on the heel?

Shamelessly stolen from LJ friend candid:

With tax my "turkey wrap" was $6.51. I handed the cashier a 20, she hit a button, and then she looked panicked and called over her co-worker:

"He gave me a 20, and I hit the 5 key!"

I couldn't understand how this could possibly matter, since the 5 key doesn't do anything except tell you how much change to give. Then the co-worker started to panic too, and it became apparent that NEITHER OF THEM KNEW HOW MUCH CHANGE TO GIVE ME ONCE THEY'D BLOWN THE CHANCE TO LET THE REGISTER COMPUTE IT FOR THEM!

I thought about telling them I was owed $53.49, but I figured someone else in line would rat on me, so I told them the right amount and they gave it to me.

This reminds me of an awful movie I saw about five minutes of, where a soldier from "today" ends up in a world centuries hence, where everyone is, um, well below average in the mental skills department (if you get my drift).

Truth is not only often stranger than fiction, but also occasionally accelerates fictional timelines.

Cheers...

Up against a brick wall...

It's not enough for the OCR Nightmare to be just plain difficult to work with physically, I've now run into a section where each sentence offers a new and challenging item to think about (but not find on the Internet).

For example, I was able to find several references to something called a "рубленый пикет" (actually given as "рубленный пикет" in my text), where a "пикет" is a survey peg that's supposed to be placed at 100-m intervals along some line, but nothing that explained what such things were. Thus, I spent altogether too much time trying to find the right expression, finally settling on an educated guess of "nonstandard survey peg," which sounds awful, but "chopped picket" sounds even worse.

There are other cases as well. Currently, I'm fussing over the following sentence:

Конструкция труб принята применительно к т. п. серии 3.501.3-184,023 «Трубы водопропускные круглые отверстием 1,5 - 3,0 м из гофрированного металла с гофром 164x57 мм для железных и автомобильных дорог».

The pipe design is taken in conformance to ??? series 3.501.3-184...

Aha! While tapping out this post, it occurred to me to see if Google returned anything on the search string "3.501.3-184," which got me a reference to "ТП 3.501.3-184-03," where "ТП" is very likely "типовой проект" ("standard design"), which is confirmed by searching for "3.501.3-*" on Google.

(Anyone who won't spell check his text to correct "рубленный" is likely to render "ТП" as "т.п." so we're still cookin', here.)

The first Google hit was a page for a plant that manufactures corrugated pipes, which is exactly on the money, and the key hit for the second search string is a reference to a "типовой проект" that also involves corrugated metal. So, having resolved this issue "in real LJ-posting time," so to speak, I continue the translation:

The pipe design is taken in conformance to standard design series 3.501.3-184.023 "Round corrugated metal culvert piping with a 1.5-3.0 m orifice and 164 x 157 mm corrugations for railroads and highways."

Wow. And that only took me... way too long if you count the struggle before firing up Semagic.

It seems the whole afternoon has been like this. And whenever something like this happens, I can't help but think that maybe my mind has turned to Silly Putty™ and that maybe I should take up the art of cutting out paper dolls or something.

But then I sit down, as I did earlier in the evening, to translate 1000 words for my best client in Houston, and the translation flows from my fingers with the fluency (and I might add, confidence) of water falling into the Niagara cataract basin.

There's no better way to see how far off base my feelings are than to run some numbers, and so, to recapitulate, though I've fallen short of my intended dozen pages of the OCR Nightmare, and translated only 7 pages, said pages represent almost 3,000 source words, which ain't too shabby.

* * *And now, for something (or some things) completely... else...

The last time I looked, which was about 30 minutes ago, as well as the time I looked before that (a couple of hours ago), these huge, lazy white snowflakes were falling onto the ground. And sticking. I shudder to think what I'll see on the ground tomorrow morning. The turned-down thermostat in the house is helping me shudder.

It occurs to me that for me, at least, the era of the desktop is over. My laptop is the new desktop. My Eee PC is my new laptop (at least in theory, as I've not had much of an opportunity to use it "under fire," so to speak).

It turns out the first episode of the new Terminator television show on Fox is available as a free download from Amazon. You just have to agree to install a bunch of their software and I don't know what else, so I've decided to devote my old VAIO for applications that I'm interested in trying out, like this Unbox thing of Amazon's, but not interested in having on my "main" machine.

At a half a meg a second, (CORRECTION: 536 Kbps, or about 54 kilobytes per second), it looks like it'll still take a few hours to download the episode. Maybe I can squeeze in another page or so of the OCR Nightmare?

Cheers...