Kinda like that meme, but freelance...

I happened to open an old copy of Изъ пушки на луну, that once belonged to a lending library in Nice, France. It is a translation, from French to Russian, of a work by Jules Verne by one Mark Vovchok, published in St. Petersburg in 1912. I am not at all sure that the book is what we know as Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, because in addition to 28 chapters in Part One, titled From the Earth to the Moon in 97 Hours, the book includes an additional 23 chapters of Part Two, titled Around the Moon.

(Most certainly a subject for future clarification, but not now, as I am taking a time-limited break from work and preparing for the home stretch on the HTML job.)

Blindly opening the book to a random page, the following snippet caught my eye on page 28:

Ничто не въ состоянiи удивить американца. Часто говорили, что слово "невозможно" для французовъ не существуетъ, но это указанiе - не по настоящему адресу. Только въ Америкѣ все можетъ казаться "просто" и "легко". Ни одинъ настоящiй янки не позволилъ бы себѣ усмотрѣть какую-либо разницу между проектомъ Барбикена и его осуществлениiемъ. Сказано - сдѣлано.

Nothing can astonish an American. It was often said that the word "impossible" didn't exist for Frenchmen, but this observation is off the mark. Only in America can everything seem "simple" and "easy." Not a single real Yankee would allow himself to discern any difference between Barbicane's plan and its accomplishment. No sooner said than done. [My translation.]

Connoisseurs of Cyrillic will note the pre-Revolutionary orthography and style.

For some strange reason, which I'm thinking has something to do with having translated a seemingly endless stream of web files, reading those few sentences was uplifting enough to be worthy of note.

Cheers...

A happy misunderstanding...

I called my mother-in-law this morning, hoping to hear some news of Galina and her sister, and Galina answered the phone. Apparently, what I had understood to be a one-week sojourn was for the weekend only (the week-long trip was the river cruise that was sold out).

Speaking to Galina raised my spirits considerably.

We then set about the task of getting her sister up and running with Skype, as she had finally gone out and bought a microphone, and I was initially discouraged when neither my nor her computer could "see" the other via Skype. It didn't take long to figure out that her machine, although on and running Skype, wasn't actually connected to the Internet. Once that small hurdle was past, we made a computer-to-computer connection and had a fine conversation.

Skype's conference calling feature is pretty slick. Last week, I connected Natalie to a conversation I had started with Galina, and today, I dialed the kids' house and Galina had an opportunity to speak with Shannon and the grandkids, all for less than 5 cents per minute, which has got to rank as one of the stupendous values of all time!

* * *I learned - the hard way - that the UNIX tar program won't recurse into subdirectories if you want to specify a file name mask (e.g., *.html), so I ended up making a copy of my work directory tree, deleting everything but the Web files, and then running tar to create an archive of all such files.

The result is a text file containing the contents of all the HTML files I've been working on. This has let me go in and tweak the target text and make usage consistent (for example, change all instances of "access rights" to "access privileges"). I am just about through with the despeckling phase, and am looking at the lone remaining item on the plate, due by the end of the day tomorrow.

Cheers...