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Serendipity...
Feb. 10th, 2008 07:31 pmI think there is a tendency for some kinds of technical information - mostly that not associated with computers or networking - to become increasingly hard to find online at no cost. Quite often, a promising Google search hit for a term I'm interested in will send me to the title page of an article in, say, a geology journal, and unless the term occurs in the article's abstract, I end up out of luck since I'm not a subscriber.
Mainstream engineering standards are available online, but for a price. A few years ago, I sprang about $50 for a 34-page ISO test standard document, as there was a chance that a Russian standard I was translating borrowed heavily from the English-language version (it didn't, really). And $50 is generally about as cheap as they come, in my experience.
Years ago, Russian state standards were freely available on the Internet, but they slowly disappeared from sight, although you can buy them online for a few bucks apiece (though my two efforts failed miserably) or purchase a DVD disk filled with such standards in (mostly) Word format for less than $10 in Moscow.
I mention this because the new French client sent me a Word document that contains a simply awful OCR of the source document, which I was somehow able to find a few minutes ago on a Russian site in exchange for registration.
* * * It occurs to me I have no good method of reviewing (I almost typed "revising," which is apparently the Britich equivalent) French. I took down one of my mother's books, with the promising title of Brush Up Your French, and found it had been published in 1931. And while the French Academy makes sure that changes in grammar occur very slowly, I somehow think that some of the idioms, such as "Je suis employé par une maison très á la page" (I'm employed by a very go-ahead firm) is somewhat out of date.
The book is not a complete loss, however. Aside from its value as a comprehension vehicle, when I first opened the book a few weeks back, a somewhat ragged and wrinkled part of a blue index card fell out, with Ne perdez jamais le courage! (which means "Never lose courage!") written on it in my grandmother's unmistakable handwriting.
I wonder what possessed her to write that? And to whom? Still, I found it.
* * * I found a note I made while watching a segment on happiness on 20/20 a couple of weeks ago. The note summarizes the "ingredient ratio" of happiness to be 50% genetic predisposition, 10% life circumstances, and 40% attitude. (In passing, I find it interesting how many people in the world are hostile to the idea that attitude has anything at all to do with happiness.)
The low figure for the factor that one might intuitively feel would have the greatest impact on happiness - life circumstances - reminds me of a similar counterintuitive result that came to my attention back when Borland hired a public speaking guru to train some of us marketing types to make more effective presentations: Over 50% of what people perceive in your presentation has to do with your body language, about 40% has to do with voice qualities (tone, enunciation, confidence), and a hair over 5% of audience perception has to do with what you are actually saying.
Which is a sobering thought, come to think of it, given what's going on in this political season.
* * * Today has been a pretty good day for me, although Galina has been feeling kind of puny. Hopefully, she'll be feeling better tomorrow morning.
Cheers...
Mainstream engineering standards are available online, but for a price. A few years ago, I sprang about $50 for a 34-page ISO test standard document, as there was a chance that a Russian standard I was translating borrowed heavily from the English-language version (it didn't, really). And $50 is generally about as cheap as they come, in my experience.
Years ago, Russian state standards were freely available on the Internet, but they slowly disappeared from sight, although you can buy them online for a few bucks apiece (though my two efforts failed miserably) or purchase a DVD disk filled with such standards in (mostly) Word format for less than $10 in Moscow.
I mention this because the new French client sent me a Word document that contains a simply awful OCR of the source document, which I was somehow able to find a few minutes ago on a Russian site in exchange for registration.
The book is not a complete loss, however. Aside from its value as a comprehension vehicle, when I first opened the book a few weeks back, a somewhat ragged and wrinkled part of a blue index card fell out, with Ne perdez jamais le courage! (which means "Never lose courage!") written on it in my grandmother's unmistakable handwriting.
I wonder what possessed her to write that? And to whom? Still, I found it.
The low figure for the factor that one might intuitively feel would have the greatest impact on happiness - life circumstances - reminds me of a similar counterintuitive result that came to my attention back when Borland hired a public speaking guru to train some of us marketing types to make more effective presentations: Over 50% of what people perceive in your presentation has to do with your body language, about 40% has to do with voice qualities (tone, enunciation, confidence), and a hair over 5% of audience perception has to do with what you are actually saying.
Which is a sobering thought, come to think of it, given what's going on in this political season.
Cheers...
