If you're tired and you know it, clap your hands!

The low point of the day involved losing 90 minutes of detailed formatting work on a Word file, for reasons that I have yet to discover. After that happened, I took a little break, returned some overdue books to the library, and then came back and redid the same work in about 40 minutes, so it wasn't all that bad.

Via ConversationExchange.com, I've been chatting via Skype these past few Thursdays with a cardiologist who lives near Paris, so that I may improve my French and he, his English. Yesterday, I spoke for the first time with a fellow from Toulouse, and the subject of our conversation was—not surprisingly—the southern French accent. My interlocutor suggested I seek out clips and films starring Fernandel, a famous French comic actor born in Marseille. As it turned out, I had first run across Fernandel's name when I read Bob Hope's I Owe Russia $1200 back in 9th grade.

Apropos of which, perhaps the one lasting anecdote I retained from that book was Hope explaining how he had attempted to perform a comedy monologue on stage in French, with disastrous results (which is to say—nobody laughed at anything he said). The explanation given in the book for why nobody laughed was that—in that day and age—no self-respecting French audience member would dare laugh at a foreigner who took the trouble to express himself in French, no matter how furiously their funnybone had been tickled. The explanation made sense at the time; I don't know to what extent I believe that now.

And so, returning to our muttons—the translation "haul" for the day has been fairly meager, so far, but another 2,000 words or so have arrived, due Monday. Perhaps I can power through another couple of thousand words before calling it a day.

Cheers...

There's a reason software engineers are like that...

There's a very old joke about a hardware engineer, software engineer, and sales engineer (a legitimate Silicon Valley job title, I might add) who were driving to the airport to catch a flight when, suddenly, there was a "pop" sound, followed by a "whup-whup-whuping" noise, accompanied by significant difficulty in controlling the vehicle. The driver pulled over on the shoulder and everyone got out.

"I've heard about this sort of thing happening," said the software engineer. "Maybe if we get back on the road, the problem will go away and everything will work."

"No," said the hardware engineer, "we've got a definite problem here, and it's probably one of the tires. I suggest we take the spare and successively swap each tire with the spare until the problem goes away."

"You are both wrong," said the sales engineer. "What we really need is a new car!"

<rim shot>

I mention this because my Kindle suffered some kind of catastrophic software glitch while I was in the middle of reading Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations, and when the hardware emerged from the long, dark, ressurrection of its silicon soul, all of the content was gone.

Yowza!

To be sure, in the final analysis, this is not as bad as it might sound, unless something like this were to happen out at the end of the copper (and pretty much everything else), where digital life chugs along at modem speeds, which happens every once in a while when I go to Kazakhstan. For now, at least, as long as I have connectivity, Amazon will happily let me download another copy of anything I've bought from them for the Kindle. As to whether bookmark information, etc. is preserved—I'm not sure that survives, but in the end, even that's not the end of the world (though it sure could be annoying).

But before going online to re-download a bunch of files, I did what years of writing control system software taught me to do: do one last reboot and see what happens.

And what happens?

This time, the Kindle found all of the "lost" files, that's what.