And it ain't even noon, yet!

Wow... it's been one of those go! go! go! kind of days.

I got up at 6:15 and immediately commenced translating the documents due today. My client had sent a note first thing East Coast time expressing some concern, but I didn't waste time worrying about it. Instead, I got the first of three documents in the mail within an hour.

Then said client calls to say that the launch campaign is on and instructs me to get a ticket ASAP, fully refundable and fully changeable. In between keystrokes, I manage to do that, arranging the flight to leave from Albuquerque, because trying to leave from Durango involves showing up for a 6:30 am departure, and then changing planes twice, once in Salt Lake City and again in New York, with about an hour's layover for each leg (don't ask me why, but to me such slim layovers all but guarantee a 24-hour delay in arrival, and I can't afford that).

In between keystrokes and ordering tickets, I finally start the wheels in motion to have enough mazuma on hand to fork over to the State of New York on the 9-month anniversary of my dad's death, which happens to be the day on which inheritance tax is due.

Once things settle down, I go back to translating, and I just sent off the last item a few minutes ago. The plate is currently empty. I am about 50% short of my "nut" for the month, and there are 7 days left in it.

Le sigh.

Cheers...

P.S. I cannot tell you how fortunate I am that jury duty was cancelled today!

George Carlin, RIP

I never realized he was that much older I am, although a moment's reflection at any time since my sophomore year in high school would've hinted at the disparity.

That was the year that - somehow - I managed to not only buy his record Class Clown, but also find a way to listen to it on the old man's stereo system without getting caught. Many times.

I've written about Carlin before, starting with my third LJ post almost 8 years ago, and his voice pops into my head almost any time I realize I have less than 1000 words to go in an assignment.

In later years, there were times when Carlin's material clicked with me and times when it sounded forced, and times when I thought it was downright awful, which probably describes the life work of most comedians.

I am sorry to hear of his death, of a heart attack, at the age of 71.

Cheers...

My first "scrape"...

Some time ago, I noticed that the overall number of views published by Flickr for my modest collection of images was substantially lower than the sum of the number of views for each individual shot. How large the discrepancy might be was hard to tell, but it was most certainly there.

While allowing my poor synapses to cool down yesterday, I clicked through and saved the HTML page source of all 23 pages of my Flickr stuff, and just now, having returned from The UPS Store <spit> and the bank, I decided to see just how hard it would be to write a Perl script to "scrape" the information I want out of the result.

It was so easy, it was scary.

I can with confidence say that despite Flickr claiming that my photos have been the subject of 9,996 views, the sum of the individual views is 45,911. I also have a pretty exact idea of which shots are the most popular, and so on.

Now, having done all this, I think I'll go take a nap. Shiloh is setting the example.

Cheers...