Productive...

[alexpgp]

It was a good day for translation, I think.

Client T from Houston calls first thing in the morning. Ten pages, due soonest. No sweat.

Client G from Chicago follows up on an e-mail from a couple of days ago and sends me a two-page fax. Again, no sweat.

Client M from Houston had sent me a 120-page document yesterday with some really weird instructions about what, exactly, the end client wanted translated. I'd looked at the file early this morning and figured it'd take me longer to count the words I translated than it would to actually translate the words. Time estimate: 3-5 hours, depending on how good my eyesight was during the review. The thing is due tomorrow afternoon, which is why I felt confident about accepting the two other jobs mentioned above.

In this case: sweat. But not because of time constraints... at least not directly.

I have rarely seen such a "document." It is possible that a thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand computers running Word might come up with something having more formatting problems, but I wouldn't take any bets on it.

This was, indeed, an extreme case of "shoehorning" words onto a page, since I ran across an extraordinary number of places where adding or deleting a letter would cause strange things to happen to the formatting (color changes, font size adjustments, disappearance of bullets, just to name three).

I've completed the beast and will look at it again tomorrow.

* * *A couple of weeks ago, one of my old coworkers asked me to write a letter in support of his petition to the INS to classify him as an alien of exceptional scientific skill. I was happy to write it, but the "samples" that his attorney sent sort of made my jaw drop.

Apparently, I'm supposed to write something that tells the INS what a cool guy I am, and only then should I actually say anything about Alex (the guy who's applying). It took me a while to get over my natural modesty, but after a couple of belts of Jameson's and reading a couple of chapters of a marketing book that shall go unmentioned, I finally sat down and let loose. I finished a few minutes ago and sent my draft off to see how well it flies with Alex's lawyer.

* * *The problem of the disappearing roads on the GPS maps displayed by my Palm were, indeed, the result of not converting the color bitmap that GpsDrive fetched from Expedia into a plain black-and-white image. I redid the maps and now the roads show up fine.

* * *There's still a pile of translation left on the plate. Time to go rest up and prepare.

Cheers...

Comments

[tamaraland.livejournal.com]

Do you know if foreign locales are available for the GPS? My parents are coming over in the fall to look for houses in Tuscany and Provence and I would like to get them a GPS so that they can stop fighting over the map not being big enough, etc. As my dad always travels with a laptop and a cell modem it seems to be a good solution. Of course salesmen always say everything works well, but it's good to hear from someone actually using it.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

GPS is designed to work all over the world, so if you get a receiver, it'll tell you where you are. (In fact, I seem to recall some Americans getting into beaucoup trouble in Moscow for using such units... it would appear that such activities are frowned upon and considered espionage, but I digress...)

I would imagine that some of the units shipping in Europe would come equipped with maps of Europe (just as some of the higher-end models here come with maps of the U.S.). Barring that, there are generally a number of ways to skin the cat, map-wise. Both solutions I've been playing with, for example, rely on third-party maps available from several sources, with the trick being to inform the software just what part of the globe the map represents (e.g., what is the lat/long of the map center and how many miles/km does the map show in the N/S and E/W directions?)

HTH.

I'd be interested to know what the prices might be for houses like the ones your parents are looking for. Most recent information I have says such real estate is very, very expensive.

Cheers...

Re:

[tamaraland.livejournal.com]

Well... as far as the housing prices go, no. Not cheap. They're not poor, they're just worried about living out their days in the US (funny considering my dad's cold war past as an MRBM tracking programmer). They want to be close enough to their children to visit, but not quite close enough to babysit.