Work plan...

Things change in this business, as they do in most enterprises.

A file that had been a "do the revisions only" assignment turned overnight into a "redo the whole thing" job when, apparently, further revisions were added by the source originator (my, doesn't that sound formal!). Fortunately, this does not impact my work plan all that much.

As noted in last night's post, the last batch of The Big Edit™ showed up, a lot earlier than usual, which means that there's a fighting chance I may finish the job before departing on vacation.

* * *There is a joke from my childhood, which I never found to be howlingly funny, that goes along the lines of:

Waiter: "How did you find your steak, sir?"
Customer: "Easy! I just moved one of the french fries over to the side and there it was!"

For some reason this anecdote came to mind when, after searching high and low for an example of a "verb chart" that my mother championed in her (and notably, my) study of French, I stumbled upon a set of them quite casually.

In the interim, I developed my own schema for French verbs, which pretty much cover what you need to know, with the notable exception of tenses that appeared in the middle column of my mother's charts, the ones that started with the past participle at the top of the column, and then sashayed through the Past Definite, the Future Anterior, the Past Conditional, the Pluperfect, the Past Anterior, the Past Subjunctive, and (my personal favorite) the Pluperfect Subjunctive.

(It is my favorite because it reminds me of the one about the guy who hails a cab at Boston's Logan airport and tells the cabbie: "I'm new in town. Take me to where I can get scrod." Upon hearing this, the cabbie pulls over to the side of the road, turns in his seat, gives his fare a hard look, and says: "Buddy, I've been driving this hack for more'n twenty years, but this is the first time someone's used the pluperfect subjunctive when asking that question!")

So, whose charts are better, mine or my mother's? I don't know right now.

* * *In other news, I've averaged more than 1,000 target words per day on the memoir for Feht. That's better than I expected.

But if I want to see more progress, I'll have to do more work and tell fewer jokes, at least for now.

Cheers...

There's a reason they designed it that way...

It is wholeheartedly... gratifying - in a schadenfreudig sort of way - to see someone enter a value in a spreadsheet cell, and then proceed to use that value in about umpteen gazillion places by entering that very value in each place, instead of, say, entering the label of the cell containing the value.

And I can tell you right now that the value currently used in the spreadsheet submitted for translation was modified, for very likely completely justifiable reasons, before I got my hands on it.

I'll let you guess how I can tell. <grin>

Cheers...

Jazzed...

I have long been a sucker for pockets. I was bummed when the Marines made it clear that, under normal circumstances, nothing was to be placed into the numerous pockets sewn into various uniforms. I was further bummed when Galina made it clear that under pretty much all circumstances, she'd prefer that I not place anything into any of the pockets that may appear in my clothes. Still, I love clothes with lots of pockets.

A long time ago, I picked up a sleeveless vest-looking piece of clothing that had suffered a severe, yet soul-satisfying outbreak of pockets. I mean, there were pockets sewn on top of pockets on this thing. I particularly liked to wear the vest on long-distance flights, because it kept a lot of stuff handy - pens, small Moleskine notebooks, iPods, paperbacks, glasses, pills, toothbrushes - saving me the trouble of having to open the overhead compartment or wrestle with bags stowed underfoot.

I still have the vest somewhere, but it's long past the stage where I can wear it in public and not have people sort of spontaneously offer me pocket change and their prayers.

So daughter Natalie, in response to some heavy hinting, arranged for an early birthday present and got me a SeV "travel vest" that arrived yesterday. SeV stands for SCOTTEVEST, which manufactures a bunch of travel-oriented clothing items and, as I understand it, is currently is sponsoring some fellow to travel around the world with literally the clothes on his back (from SeV, natch), which is to say: without luggage, but with all his possessions squirreled away in SeV pockets.

SeV claims a NoBulge™ pocket design, so that when you've socked away your iPod, BlackBerry, sunglasses, passport, digital camera, extra SD card, keys, 20-oz. Coke, wallet, ID, paperback, ping-pong paddle and the Notre Dame backfield (just kidding about that last), you don't actually look as if all that stuff is on your person.

Galina disputes the efficacy of that aspect of the design, at least when I'm wearing the vest, which she says looks good on me, otherwise. I sort of have to agree, because the camera I took with me to Huntür's soccer game last night was still pretty noticeable, even though I had stowed it in the pocket designed for cameras.

I am particularly impressed with the fact that SeV put a laminated card in each pocket big enough to contain such a card, with a short description and a hint or two regarding potential uses. (The eyeglass pocket, for example, is appropriately sized and comes with a wiping cloth that's gripped by a small clip lanyard. The pen pocket, on the other hand, does not come with a card.)

In all, the SeV web site says the vest is equipped with 22 pockets.

I'm still trying to find them all.

Cheers...

A small find...

Back when I wrote translations for Plenum, they arrived as journal pages (literally; the translation secretary cut the spines off original journal copies and sent the appropriate pages), and as a result, although I just managed to open an old I-don't-know-what-format file of a translation I wrote in late 1990 or early 1991, I have long disposed of any original against which to evaluate its quality.

The title, author, and abstract of the article are:

On a problem of group choice

Yu. A Bobrovskii, O.K. Ilyunin, B.V. Novikov, A.Ya. Rapoport, and M.L. Sodin UDC 65.01

Khar'kov Radioelectronics Institute, Khar'kov State University, and FTINT, Khar'kov. Translated from Avtomatika i Telemekhanika, No. 9, pp. 101-108, September 1990. Original article submitted August 1, 1989.

A metric approach is applied to a class of group selection problems in which individual preferences are representable as linear series over a set of comparable alternatives, while group opinion is represented by relations such as dichotomic ranging, corresponding to the selection of a group of attractive alternatives from among all alternatives. Optimum algorithms are obtained for finding a set of attractive alternatives without resorting to search.

Plenum allowed translators to basically ignore complex expressions, requiring only that a series of five dots be inserted into the manuscript for any such expression, as in:

Now, in order to maximize F(R), it is necessary to use rule (3) when ..... and ....., since for these values of i, j, ....., there are no boundaries on the values of ..... imposed by the class ...... .

Plenum was some sort of initiation into this line of work, let me tell you.

Cheers...