alexpgp | Another long 'un...

It's taking nearly forever to invoice the Excel job. You see, clients rarely are willing to pay for numbers that aren't touched as they move from the source to the translated document, which makes sense for an electronic document, but when you add the work of removing the numbers to the task of counting the words in the Excel file... well, it can get pretty daunting.

The best way to do that, I've found, is to save the Excel file (one worksheet at a time, of course) as a text file, and then count the words in the text file.

* * *Last night, when I inserted one of the batteries from the alarm clock that Sasha chewed up the other day into the Yashica, I found that the arrow in the exposure meter did not move. This made me a sad camper, until I realized that the arrow can't move until the unit knows what the "speed" of the film is, and it can't know that until there's a film canister in the body. So this morning, I put a roll of Fuji 400 into the unit, inserted the battery and - pow! - all seems to work.

The decision before me now is whether to blow $10 or so on a test roll of film, or should I just use the roll that's in there for the Leonids on Saturday night/Sunday morning?

I also have to find a remote shutter release for the unit, so that I can do a long-duration exposure without having to keep my finger on the shutter release button.

* * *Drew, Galina, and I spent some time this afternoon drawing up a plan for the landlord regarding where we are going to move various things. The upshot of the rearrangement is to move the post office boxes toward the front and to rotate the counter about 90 degrees, thereby adding about 10-15 feet of work space for us behind the counter.

This will be a vast improvement over the cramped quarters we currently enjoy behind the post office boxes. It's so tight back there that with only a few boxes, it's tough to move around, and packing anything of any size requires one to literally go out into the parking lot in the rear of the shop and lay things out on the asphalt.

That alternative is not going to work very well in a couple of weeks, when there'll be snow on the ground.

* * *I'm appointing myself in charge of going to fetch Lee from the Albuquerque airport on Monday night. Her plane arrives at 9:45 pm or so, and it will be a relatively slow drive home as deer and elk seem to materialize on 16-inch centers along the road as soon as the sun goes down, and that requires slower speeds and extra caution. (Believe me, you do not ever want to hit a deer or elk with a car, because the result is very similar to hitting a brick wall, especially at higher speeds, say above 20 miles per hour. Not to mention it's not terribly pleasant for the animal.)

* * *I took a one-week "vacation" from my e-mail chess games when I went to L.A. I only just got back into the swing of things by sending my opponents a set of moves. I'll have to reply more quickly in the future, as I've used up quite a bit of my "thinking time" for the first 10 moves.

Cheers...