Nearly a perfect storm of suck...

It is, of course, a cardinal sin to leave things until the last minute, and in fact, the fact I'm writing this about a job due Tuesday is evidence of my not having done so, but things did get dicey for a while, there.

Last night, I launched Wordfast Pro, which is slated to be the next generation of the product upon which I base quite a bit of my income. The idea was to use it to translate a Web site that is the object of my current attention, and for that purpose, I can - without reservation - say that the application is "not ready for prime time."

I strongly suspect the show-stopper is the fact that the Web site has been composed using the 'windows-1251' character set, while Wordfast Pro seems only capable (no matter what the settings say) of understanding the 'utf-8' character set.

It was difficult to find information on the Internet about this subject, because starting around 9 pm last night, the DNS provided by my ISP - which is the service that converts human-readable web site names into strings of network addresses - apparently had a partial nervous breakdown.

I say partial because I could get at some sites, but not others. Naturally, all the sites I wanted to get to were shut off to me, so I had to go to plan B and connect to the Internet via my Verizon BlackBerry.

Anyway, I'm back doing things the old fashioned way, using Wordfast "Classic," and I'm hoping I'm at least 1/3 of the way through the job. There are other small jobs that need attention, too, and I better get to them.

Cheers...

Time to stand down...

It's been quite an interesting Friday.

In addition to the large item due Tuesday, I've now got four three short items due on Monday morning.

Historically, I've found it notoriously hard to assess the size of HTML translation projects, because software translation tools are notorious for leaving out some text that ought to be included in the word count, while including some text that shouldn't be. It's an issue for billing, to be sure, but more so for figuring out one's progress. So, for time planning purposes, I just cross my fingers, assume a certain "density" of translatable text per kilobyte of HTML, and proceed from there.

So far - and I'm about through for the day, so it's not as if I plan to do more work tonight - I've processed 170 kB of files. As there are about 140 kB left, I would appear to be about halfway through the job. Go me!

Lightning is making itself apparent both visually and audibly as I type this. It rained last night and has been raining on and off during the day. This leads me to believe that tomorrow morning may be a propitious time to go look for mushrooms, assuming the rain has let up by then. The season is, after all, about to begin.

As it would appear that I am halfway through the big job, and knowing that the small jobs that arrived today will not take long, I am of the opinion that I can spare the time tomorrow morning to go hunt fungus.

Galina left with her sister on a week-long tour of the so-called "Golden Ring," which is the name given to a group of ancient Russian towns not far from Moscow. I hope they have a good time.

(FWIW, Galina and I spent a short honeymoon in the wintry-bleak Golden Ring town of Yaroslavl because of the "no-more-than-three-days-at-a-time-in-Moscow" rule that was in effect for foreigners back when we got married. I'll be curious to see any photos that are taken of the town, and what changes might be apparent.)

Time to post and shut down before the light show gets any closer.

Cheers...