Same idea, different set of equipment...

Sometimes, things just sort of hit you out of the blue.

The latest example was initiated by LJ friend velvet_granat, who sent a link to the following graphic:

Indeed, one of the maddening things about deciphering Russian cursive is trying to distinguish among the letters п, т, и, and ш when they follow each other in a word (the graphic shows the word "дышишь").

As I was enjoying the amusement, the nonsense sentence

HE HISSES HIS ESSES

suddenly popped into my mind, which I do not recall having read anywhere - and a Google search supports my recollection - but which would be cumbersome to decipher in Morse code, because all of the letters E, I, S, and H are represented by "dit" sounds (keep in mind that Morse is sensed, either audibly or visibly, and not perceived symbolically the way letters are).

The result is a series of "dit" sounds where the slight pauses between letters and the slightly longer pauses between words would be of paramount importance.

Which reminds me of a parable concerning comprehension of spoken Japanese, but I really must get back to work.

Cheers...

Puttering, sort of...

After writing invoices for the past two weeks of work, I observe that I have nothing much to dance about, and that my memory of billings for this past April is much rosier than the reality. September billings have already exceeded those for April by almost 300%.

I tried using the new Java-based WordFast for the humongous PowerPoint presentation I was sent today, and while getting set up is a dream, the actual working-with-it sucks dead bunny rabbits through a soda straw.

I can't tell what's worse, the fact that the application insists on propagating translations not only for the segment you just finished, but for the following two segments as well, or the inability to overcome the source originator's lack of wordsmithing skill, so that there is no way to rearrange

control
system

so as to deal with a single "segment" instead of two.

The former problem merely means having to highlight the improperly propagated translation and overtype the correct translation, which is merely a pain in the butt. The latter problem means not being able to translate without devising some kind of kludge that would end up polluting the translation memory database.

To do all this successfully (where "this" includes the translation, packing, departing, driving, arriving, and unpacking) is going to be a challenge.

Cheers...

That's what I'm talking about...

I managed to get 1200 words of the PowerPoint presentation under my fingertips, despite the little setback with WordFast Pro. That makes the day's total slightly greater than 4200 words, which is not as productive as yesterday, but much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

* * *Galina and I took our first hot-air balloon ride back in February 2003 here in Pagosa (documented in this post). If memory serves, there were at least two dozen participants for that event in 2003. There was a similar event this past weekend (though we counted less than a dozen envelopes in the air), and we only just happened to notice the event because one of the participants very nearly landed his hot-air envelope in our back yard. I took the shot below from our front door.


As it turned out, the balloon had enough "juice" to gain the dirt road that dead-ends around 100 yards from our property, so I guess everything turned out okay.

Cheers...