Revisited by an old bugaboo...

My most recent VAIO, webster, came with a hard drive of about 90 GB, which is tiny considering the amount of mass storage that comes as standard these days even with low-end machines (my Acer netbook, for example, has about twice that). Still, I've only run into the storage "wall" (running out of space) once or twice over the almost three years I've had the machine.

Moreover, I really didn't run out of space on the Acer today (named buckley), but I did get within about 10 GB of doing so. Windows 7 helpfully highlights the disk display in red when storage falls below some critical number (10%, I'm guessing), so I went looking for whatever files that had "eaten" my disk space.

That was where I became truly aware of just how much disk real estate OCR requires.

Once I deleted a bunch of OCR files (and a bunch of CD ISO files that I no longer need), my free disk space went back up to some reasonable size).

* * *The promised flood of email traffic never materialized; instead, there was one email whose contents weighed in at less than 300 words. I fully intended to start on the Next Big Job™, but kept getting sidetracked until pretty late. Still, I was able to get about 70% of the way to where I wanted to be by the end of the day, so as long as the floodgates do not slam open tomorrow, I foresee no worries. (If the floodgates open, I'm just going to have to turn away work.)

* * *I signed up for ScriptFrenzy, but really don't know why, especially since I'll probably be traveling for some part of April. Still, 'tis better to sign up than not, I guess.

* * *En passant, the final lines of stanza 12 of canto 1 in Eugene Onegin read as follows:

И рогоносец величавый,
Всегда довольный сам собой,
Своим обедом и женой.

One reason I cite these lines is because they are an example of the kind of snippet that embeds itself in my memory and requires no further effort to remember. More typically, such snippets consist of one line, as in an instance I experienced not long ago, of a line from Bulgakov's M&M: "Каждое ведомство должно заниматься своими делами" ("Each department must mind its own affairs"). But I digress...

I suppose the lines from EO are memorable because of the use of the word рогоносец, which denotes a cuckold, but the structure of which clearly betrays the meaning of "horn-wearer" (носить = to wear, рога = horns).

I mention this also because, in looking at Nabokov's translation of these lines (to see how he dealt with them), I find the following:

and the majestical cornuto,
always pleased with himself,
his dinner, and his wife.

I have to tell you, I've never heard of "cornuto" (nor am I sure I will, ever again), though it does appear in my OED.

Sigh. Reading Nabokov in English can be more frustrating, sometimes, than reading Pushkin in the original Russian.

Cheers...