Morning greetings...

Almost two years to the day, the battery on my iPod touch appears to be on its last legs, unable to hold a charge for very long, though the device will still play for a while once charged. I had noticed some wacky behavior with the battery indicator (it would show red on power-up, then climb slowly back up to about 30-40%), but when I tried to turn the iPod on last night, the battery was dead, dead, dead. (In fact, it has taken some time for the unit to develop enough of a charge this morning to signal its presence to Windows.)

It is said that "bacn" (bacon) is a cross between unsolicited emails ("spam") and email that is welcome, if not actively solicited ("ham"). Specifically, it's all that email that you get from various sources to whom you voluntarily gave your email address (in particular, any online merchants).

There's some bacn out there that borders on spam, given the frequency of communication and the utter unimportance of the messages. On the other hand, there is bacn out there that shows up very infrequently, and actually is worth the mouse-click it takes to open it.

So today, I get mail from Audible.com, of which I'm a member. The enticement is to download a free ebook. I open the message, click on the link, and find that the offer is only good for new members. I reread the message and, sure enough, at the bottom, it says:

You received this email because you are a registrant or subscriber of audible.com.

You'd think they'd check their list of active, subscribing members before sending out this kind of thing, wouldn't you. Sheesh!

That said, may all my frustrations be as serious. I've got beaucoup work to do.

Cheers...

UPDATE: After over an hour of charging, the iPod's battery is still at minimum level. I guess it's time to check out battery replacement alternatives to Apple's $79 service.

Afternoon delight...

The iPod's battery gave every indication that it had well and truly died this morning, because not only did it not show any accumulated charge after an hour on the USB cable, but the player actually "woke up" a couple of times during the morning, as if the battery charge level had just risen to the minimum level required to let the computer know the device was there.

Just now, I turned the unit on and it shows 100% charge on the battery.

My next step, I think, is going to be to noodle around various iPod resources on the net, to find out if perhaps what I'm experiencing is the result of an upgrade bug.

* * *Galina and I went for a drive a couple of hours ago and ended up passing by the Methodist Thrift Shop downtown. We stopped in to chat - Galina knows some of the staff - and I checked out the bookshelves, stopping cold when I saw a medium-sized cardboard box with 9 of the 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization.

I'm not quite sure I'll lug any of these tomes to Kazakhstan with me, but I've already dipped into The Life of Greece, and plan to take what is described as an electronic version of this tome with me, though I may not have time to read it.

* * *In other "financial" news, I managed to find a reasonably priced hotel within a mile or so of the hotel at which the 51th Annual ATA Conference is being held in Denver at the end of the month, so now I can focus on actually polishing my presentation (writing is a form of polishing, is it not?) and rehearsing it to make sure it fits within my allotted time frame.

* * *FWIW, I sent off the first chunk of Feht's text this morning, which takes a bit of a load off my mind.

I'm currently 4,000 words of the way through a report that I'd like to finish by the end of the day (1,600 words to go!).

In other translation-related news, I've successfully posted a "term of the day" at the Translation Outpost for the third day in a row, which is a record. The next step is to develop a habit to do so daily (I had to do it for LJ, way back when), figure out the best way to build some traffic toward the site.

And so, said the author, it goes.

Cheers...

Mahh-velous...

According to a piece published on Ars Technica, it would appear that deleting a photo on Facebook is a lot like deleting a file from your computer: the file isn't really gone, you just can't get at it.

Unless, it turns out, you happen to know exactly where to go look for it, or - in the case of a photo posted to Facebook - one happens to possess the direct URL to the photo.

While Facebook repeated assurances to Ars that they were working with their "content delivery network" to reduce the amount of time deleted material remains in the network cache, the fact of the matter is that a photo of Ars reporter Jacqui Cheng deleted from Facebook on May 21, 2009 was apparently still accessible on the Facebook CDN servers up to earlier today.

That's, like, 16 months!

Of course, the major lesson to be taken away from this is to always assume that anything you upload or post to the Internet will remain there forever (with all of the deliciously evil implications suggested by Murphy's Law).

Cheers...

Unusually prolix for someone so tired...

I've completed a translation-memory-aided 6,500 target words for the day (and are my arms tired!), which is enough.

While running my special "DateReplace" macro (a marvelous invention that takes various date formats and reverses the first two numbers, e.g., '10.3.10' becomes '03/10/10'), it occurred to me to wonder: When did they start calling the Renaissance "the Renaissance"?

The same question goes for the "Age of Enlightenment" and various other historical epochs whose names are familiar to us - some of us - today: When did it become apparent that something was happening, so much so that it received a name?

Recent history suggests that contemporary labels are, in effect, marketing slime concocted by intellectuals manufactured en masse to address the fashions of the time.

* * *Just two weeks left until the ATA conference!

Cheers...