Support followup...

RingCube, the folks who publish Mojopac, were pretty helpful in pointing me in the right direction in case I ever want to run their product from inside an encrypted partition.

Amazon, on the other hand, sent me a boilerplate reply that didn't address my complaint or provide any useful information. What a bunch of maroons!

Cheers...

Quantum filling...

A job landed in the inbox a little while ago, a PDF weighing in at 82 pages, with very few "weird" pages. My estimate of the source word count is 25,000, which made the proposed deadline of next Wednesday sort of a strain.

One is always better off negotiating deadlines over the phone, to avoid what happened to me a little while back with one of my French clients (asking for a one-day extension by email netted a "we've assigned the work elsewhere" response), though in that case, the loss of the job was a blessing in disguise. Fortunately, the client for this job has gone along with my proposal to extend the deadline by a day.

This assignment is an undisguised blessing, as it should allow me to make my "nut" for February (and just in time, too, despite it being a short month!).

* * *I stopped by the Staples in Glen Cove yesterday to drop off the FedEx with my passport, et al. (which has been delivered for processing, according to an email from FedEx delivered 17 minutes ago). While I was there, I took a look at prices for memory sticks, as the 1-GB unit in my VAIO has gotten too small for my needs. There was a good sale going on for 4-GB sticks, which allowed me to consolidate the information I need in one place (and still leaves me with a 2-GB flash card that's nearly empty).

* * *I should probably go take the dog for a walk, and then settle down to OCR the new job and finish a document due tomorrow morning. Starting tomorrow, I need to translate something close to 4,000 source words per day to hit the deadline.

Cheers...

O'Rourke hits the nail on the head...again!

From P.J. O'Rourke's latest, On the Wealth of Nations:

"Never complain that the people in power are stupid. It is their best trait."

A universal truth.

Cheers...

There's customer service...

...and there's, um, servicing the customer.

The long-distance bill came in for the house, with a $250 charge for a 40-minute phone call made at the end of last year to Russia to wish everyone Happy New Year. I thought I had made that call using my AT&T calling card, so I called AT&T Customer Service to find out if they could tell me if that had been the case.

It wasn't.

Which means I actually did use AT&T's Long Distance service at nearly $7 per minute to chat up the in-laws.

Ye gods. I haven't paid $7 per minute since shortly after I married Galina and all calls to the USSR were operator-assisted (on the USSR side, natch) at something like $9 per minute.

Cheers...