Doing some thinking...

Good morning! We are up and at 'em, bright and early, clear-eyed and bushy tailed, etc.

The first job of the day - to update some data on a client's web site - went by remarkably well despite the fact I had the wrong password written down. (Yes, I write them down. When you ask me to compose something at least 8 characters long made up of at least one upper-case, at least one lower-case, at least one numeral, and an least one of a motley collection of "other" characters, where the end result may not resemble or contain any dictionary word in any of several languages or resemble any password I've ever used... I am going to write it down, hopefully correctly this time, so as to avoid having you sending me a password reset email containing my password and user name over an unencrypted network, i.e., the Internet.)

However, that's not the reason for this post. While semiconsciously composing the above paragraph, I've been wrestling with the following. The source text in the translation I'm writing right now (task No. 2) contains the following wording:

предотвращать невозможность возвращения

My first try at translation came through as:

to preclude the inability to return

Which sounds awful in English (it reeks of double negativity, without being explicitly so). The context is that of a spacewalker who is sitting on the end of a robotic arm, where you want to make sure that said person never gets into a position where they can't get back into the station.

So, I am wondering if, in the context of the document I'm working with, I can translate this as:

to assure the ability to return

Some might quibble that I am taking a liberty, but I think not.

Cheers...

UPDATE: The point has been mooted, as I have judiciously reworded the sentence during the final review. There is always a way.

Sink or swim...

On a whim, I tried out the old Intel CS340 just to see what would happen when I plugged it into an XP laptop.

Sonofagun. It works. A few tweaks, a mike, and...

Cheers...