Not much work but...

Folks sure get all sorts of formal around this time of year, and I guess this year in particular. My inbox has been filling with "requests" to fill out all manner of paperwork, including updated resumes, agreements, and tax forms, so perhaps not having a deadline huffing its not, sulfurous breath down my throat is a blessing in disguise.

I was struck by a fairly workable idea for this week's Idol prompt, and although one might assume that—absent said huffing deadline—I've got nothing but time on my hands, such is not the case.

Still, I've got more time than usual (though if one were to be utterly brutal about it, I've got just as much time as anyone else, the whole of 1440 minutes during any given day), so I better get to it.

Cheers...

Toss-up...

One of the cute tricks some agencies pull with translator résumés is to include them with proposals in order to show the agency's depth of experience, etc. Often, they'll even ask the translators to write short "test" translations that are also appended to the proposal.

The trick involves never actually using such translators in the event the job is landed, because there's always someone out there willing to work for a penny-and-a-half a word. And for some reason—very likely the fact that the people who pay for the work are far removed from those who actually have to use the product of the work and thereby don't really care about product quality as long as costs are contained—agencies that pull this kind of fast one fail to go out of business as often as not.

The thought crossed my mind, as I went through the exercise of updating my own résumé, of adding a line to the footer, to the effect of "This resume may not be used to solicit work without the express consent of [me] or [my company]," but in the time it has taken to tap my way this far, it occurs to me that I'd just be stroking my ego by doing so. Worse, there is the potential of ticking off good clients while not eliciting any response at all from the tricksters (especially when they solicit work using my résumé!).

Cheers...

First job...

The first job of the year popped into the inbox this afternoon, and it was from French to English.

And for the first time in my career, my year-to-date French-to-English word count has exceeded my Russian-to-English word count.

And for the first time since—golly, I don't know when... certainly this millennium—I've used Microsoft Outlook to send email.

OO-rah!

Cheers...

The email client blues...

Pretty much every email client I've ever used after striking out on my own (going back to something called 'mutt' that ran on a Linux box) has allowed the 'From' email address to vary depending on various conditions, the most logical of which is to use the 'To' email of a message to which one might be responding.

Not Outlook. No, sir-ee.

Sure, you can specify any 'From' address you like, by hand. And even if you do, your 'real' email address—according to Outlook—will be embedded in the headers, and I could even live with that (because nobody routinely browses their email headers), but one thing I cannot risk—and I learned this the hard way when I replied to email on my erstwhile BlackBerry—is having clients accidentally send mail to me at an address that I don't check all that often when I'm working. Similarly, I don't want my work inbox filled with various forms of non-work mail.

Wow. I haven't used Outlook for more than 6 hours and I've already run across a serious show-stopper! That must be some kind of record.

That, combined with the fact that Outlook runs like cold molasses down a glacier, and it's outahere!

Cheers...

A long day...

I actually woke up at around 3:30 am and then tossed and turned until 5:30, when I got out of bed.

My total French words translated to date this year is about to get walloped by a Russian document I was assigned late in the day, with the encouragement that "if I could extract it from the database, it was mine." The document in question is a Russian state standard, 31 pages in length, and while it's available for free from a number of sources on the Runet, typically the pages are low-resolution, a pain in the butt to read, and even more of a pain to OCR. Still, I managed not only to download 31 GIF files, but also to find a PDF of the whole thing, so I ought to be in pretty good shape to do the work (all roughly 13,000 words of it).

And to those who celebrate Christmas 'round about now: Поздравляю Вас с Рождеством! Пусть любовь, доброта, благополучия, счастья, здоровья, и чуткие друзья будут Вашими спутниками в этом году!

Cheers...