Moving right along...

As it turned out, I managed to get in touch with the limo service yesterday and arranged for them to pick Galina up for her trip to the airport this morning. Galina called a little while ago to say she was on her way to LaGuardia.

A request to translate a relatively short email popped into my inbox this morning, and I felt peppy enough to see if I could figure out how to use the Pages app on my iPad to create a document whose appearance was, to the extent possible, identical to the product I usually deliver. I do this kind of thing from time to time as a "road warrior" exercise, to see how well I can work under conditions that are typical while on travel.

Since this was a test, I sent the exported-as-Word result to myself and was pleased to see that the only thing that needed tweaking was the footer (font, size, and color) and to figure out if Pages will let me put a horizontal line on the page without having to resort to embedding a "shape" (in Word, one can easily create a border under a paragraph). Weighing the result against how much prior experience I've had with Pages (zero), I must consider this exercise to have ended successfully.

With this morning's item out of the way, there remains one item on the plate, and it's fairly large (at least by pre-40K Job standards; about 8,500 words).

I better get started, as there are some errands that require my attention as well.

Cheers...

Happenstance, while doing other things...

I ran across my old university roommate on Twitter in October of last year, and again on Google+ recently. For some reason, seeing his mug in my Stream today brought to mind a photo I took this past April, at the house in New York, of an advertising desk blotter that my roommate, I, and a mutual friend of ours named Jim had sold ads for, composed, had printed, and then distributed to just about everyone on campus.

Needless to say, we did not retire on the proceeds from the venture.

Anyway, I decided to send my roommate a copy of the photo, for auld lang syne. And that prompted me to ask if he'd ever heard from Jim after the three of us had parted ways. In my note, I added that I'd Googled our friend's name (quite searchable) from time to time over the years, but never got a credible "hit."

Before sending the photo and email, I did a spur-of-the-moment Google search for our friend, and there—on the first page of results—was a news article about a man of the right name, a librarian (which was Jim's interest), of the right age, from the right part of the country having been found in the California desert by hikers in 2001 after having disappeared in 1998.

It's funny how Google operates. I know I've searched for his name since 2001, but nothing relevant ever popped up. And this kind of thing—hitting a jackpot after many failures over time—has happened to me in other cases as well, over the years.

Thinking about it, taking a solo hike in a desert strikes me as so like Jim.

Rest in peace, Jim, whether or not it's you.