Be wary of side-effects...

The other day I mentioned a trick by which you could run PowerPoint in two windows at the same time, the expedient being to invoke PowerPoint from the command line as if it were some other user doing the deed.

Well, now I find one small caveat associated with this trick: applications in "your"
userspace do not, by default, recognize applications in the "other" userspace.

What do I mean?

My translation memory application of choice is Wordfast, which has an add-in that allows me to translate PowerPoint slides while using Word.

It's a pretty slick item, when it works, which is most of the time. Finished work has to be carefully checked to make sure the add-in caught (or PowerPoint provided access to... I can't tell who is at fault) all of the text in a presentation.

Just now, I had a file open in PowerPoint, but Word was jumping down my throat, telling me there was no PowerPoint presentation open.

This was a major whisky-tango-foxtrot moment, let me tell you.

Of course, as a former software engineer, what did I do?

Right! I tried it again!

Same result.

I was getting ready to open up a second PowerPoint window and translate the file "the old fashioned way," when it occurred to me that... could it be?... maybe the PowerPoint file that was open was using the "ghostrider" account I had set up on my machine?

And that's what it turned out to be.

Now if only the add-in didn't follow the one-line-a-time segmentation that sometimes drives me batty, I'd be a lot happier.

Cheers...

Why is it so hot here, and why am I in a handbasket?

I spent 24 minutes on the phone with Comcast trying to find out the status of my trouble ticket, but nobody there really wanted to bother with that. Instead, they wanted me to rehash what had been done so far, after which - in a manner that would make Dell customer service envious - they shuttled me to another department that repeated the exercise. After about four iterations, they declared that since I am, in actuality, an Earthlink customer, I needed to talk to Earthlink. (This, despite the fact that the hardware and infrastructure belong to Comcast.)

Fair enough. I call Earthlink, which earnestly doesn't want me to talk to a human, its computer-generated voice insisting that, if my problem has to do with connectivity, there's nothing they can do for me, and I must talk to Comcast. Asking for a "representative" or trying to dial numbers to get vectored off to some related department where a human might answer the phone made about as much impact as mosquito spit in a monsoon.

So I call Comcast again, now with a longer story, and eventually - worn down from holding a phone to my ear - I eagerly hang up after getting someone to admit my ticket is still open.

* * *LJ friend spidielives threw a major wrench into the workings of what has been laughingly called my mind with her home game entry for this week's LJ Idol. Her entry got me to thinking along even broader lines than before, and now I'm completely at sea.

Well, not entirely. One idea I have focuses on a memoir type of entry, but I'm not sure, in the end, of how much interest it might be to the casual reader, or whether I'd have the time, between now and deadline, to forge it into something of interest.

Another idea that keeps bobbing up and down like a bone in a stew - one directly inspired by spidielives - will take me entirely too long to implement and it takes the kind of chance one generally finds only in PowerBall, because if it doesn't click with the readers (as is often the case with entries that involve poetry, for example), I'll be out of the competition faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball.

* * *Receiving an email from a client that "reminds" me of a lower rate of pay for certain kinds of work that I did recently has sort of put me in a bad mood, because I don't recall ever being told of the lower rate in the first place. Thus, the request to amend my rate seems a bit unilateral and after-the-fact.

I composed a reply, then ditched it and started over. What I ended up sending was a request to know who it was who was supposed to inform me of the lower rate in the first place.

In the end, my retirement will not depend on the difference between what I invoiced and what I've been asked to invoice (though I do not walk by such sums lying in the street); it's simply that I do not like being treated this way.

In other work news, I translated just over 5,000 target words yesterday, and am working on 4,500 target words so far today.

* * *I'm guessing that I may have to admit I bit off more than I could manage with Nanowrimo, but we'll see.

Cheers...

UPDATE (11:40 pm): The day's word count is 5,150 or so, and I'm 69 slides through a 103-slide presentation. I'm going to go uncross my eyes for about 7 hours, I think.

LJ Idol 6.3: The secret of getting stuck...

In a dim memory from my early childhood, I recall being in a clean, brightly lit room with my mom. We are there with a man, who is dressed in white and wears the shiniest black shoes. This man has my undivided trust, because at that age, anyone who gives you lovely, sweet, multicolored lollipops for sitting still while he puts tubes in his ears and listens to your chest or while he puts a wooden ice cream stick in your mouth while you try to say "Ahhh!" must be a pretty fine person.

On this day, however, the nice man was holding something new in his hand. It was about the size of a pen, and it seemed to have a needle sticking out of one end. Taking hold of my arm, and without a word of warning, he buried the needle in my tender bicep.

I was too shocked to react immediately, but not too shocked to remember the experience.

From that point on, it seemed every visit to a doctor ended in a shot, and I most seriously did not look forward to them. But there was nothing I could do to avoid them, either. Crying did not help. Pleading was of no avail. I was doomed.

Several years later, at the office of my grandmother's ear-nose-and-throat doctor, I had my adenoids removed. It wasn't a very pleasant experience, but on the whole, it didn't hurt much, either. Shortly after the doctor put away his instruments, he turned around, holding a large hypodermic syringe, and instructed me to take off my pants, and my underpants, so he could give me an injection in my backside. I had never heard of such a thing, but the doctor insisted.

My actions spoke louder than any words I could conjure. I kicked him in the shins and drove my shoes down onto his toes. Before either he or my mother could recover, I ran to the door of his surgery and out into the waiting room. Powdered old ladies and elegant old gentlemen of my grandmother's age seemed mostly amused by my valiant, yet doomed resistance. Eventually, my mother captured me and dragged me back to face my comeuppance, and the penicillin.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when our Senior Drill Instructor announced that our recruit platoon had "volunteered" to donate blood I was less than gung ho (as they say in the Marines) about the prospect, but there was nothing to be done. I had no great phobia about getting injected; in fact, shortly after arrival at boot camp, we all received a battery of injections, many of them administered using compressed air, and I had made it through okay. I had never given blood, though, and the prospect made me apprehensive.

The Naval hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, admitted us in the early afternoon.

"Have you ever had syphilis, hepatitis, or have you been tattooed in the last six months?" intoned a bearded corpsman from behind a portable metal desk, reviewing a form I had filled out.

"Sir, no, sir!"

"Go to room twelve, private," said the corpman.

"Sir, yes, sir!"

Once in room 12, those of us who were eligible to donate blood had our fingers pricked to aid in blood typing. We sat down to wait, contemplating our index fingers.

"Number thirty-one!" cried a voice from somewhere in the room. Thirty-one was my so-called "laundry number," which served a number of other purposes as well, as in the present case. I stood up and raised my hand, as we had been instructed to do.

"Over here!" commanded a white-coated, jean-clad Figure of Authority on the other side of the room.

I wound past my platoon-mates, who lay enmeshed in tangles of plastic tubing, impaled with rather sizeable needles. I could feel my blood shift from side to side in my body, away from these needles as I passed them, I was sure of it.

"Lie down," ordered the corpsman who had called out my number. I did so, closing my eyes and wondering whether the level of adrenalin in my blood was high enough to dissolve plastic tubing. The corpsman fussed with my arm.

"You're pretty tense," he said. "Have you ever given blood before?"

"Sir, no, sir," I said, not quite so loudly as usual.

"You want to know a little secret about how to avoid pain when getting stuck?"

"Sir, yes, sir!" I said. The exclamation point was back in my words.

"I want you to smile," said the corpsman. "Close your eyes, think of something happy, and then smile like your mouth is trying to make your cheeks come up and cover your eyes. You got that?"

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Good. Do it," he said, "while I adjust your arm."

I did as instructed - though I felt a little silly - and after a few moments, I opened my eyes and looked down. The needle was already in place. I hadn't felt a thing.

As I watched, I saw my blood - more of it than I had ever seen at one time - start flowing out of my arm, through a tube, and into a pint-sized plastic collection bag. I was only able to tear my eyes away when the corpsman who had engineered this medical marvel turned to a colleague and asked, "Hey, do I have this guy hooked up right?"

When I turned to him with a horrified look, he smiled and said, "Just messin' with you, recruit. Relax." I tried, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he had said what he did to raise my blood pressure, perhaps to make the bag fill faster. Whatever the reason, he succeeded.

A few minutes later, with a sterile cotton ball pressed into the crook of my elbow, I entered the "recovery room" where... glory!... they were issuing one warm can of Coca-Cola and three chocolate cream cookies to each of us and ordering us to consume them! Doctor's orders!

I had gone through a real fast second childhood in that hospital, and had learned a secret of getting "stuck" without experiencing pain. It's funny where you learn things.

Our platoon was back on the bus in no time at all, headed back to Parris Island.

Liposuction? No! It's a lipogram!

It’s a tough job training old dogs
to do any tricks at all, and
nothing can push you to do it,
not for spring's first blush
displaying happy philanthropy,
nor bright fall colors blazing
on distant mountaintops,
nor a glorious full moon
sailing across a sky
without a cloud in sight.
It's a drag, upon my word,
without any doubt at all.

But I'll go on with my story,
which may grow haltingly, in spurts,
and lack continuity and clarity, but finally,
though you may sniff and snort,
or laugh or sing, or chirp or buzz,
shall triumphantly swoop, with royal
hullabaloo and flimsy vocabulary
in a most loving, solicitous way,
into a ballad, of sorts... or not.