grin and bear it

White bird featherless flew from paradise,
Lit on the castle wall;
Along came lord landless,
Took it up handless,
Rode away horseless to the king's white hall.

It's still snowing. I don't think it's stopped since yesterday morning, but we've only got something like 7". The last time I saw an estimate, it said 1" today and 6-12" total, but I'm not sure I believe that.

Last night's project management meeting was about two hours long, and I really hope we get enough done on Thursday night so we don't have to have a meeting on Saturday. This can't be as difficult as we're making it out to be. Some of it is probably inexperience, but some of the rest of it is probably the fact that this is a group project. We don't argue, but we certainly discuss everything to death. We're trying to come up with a scope document for a mythical localization project, following which we have to bid against the other groups to actually be awarded the contract. Every week, e-mail, meeting and lecture reinforces the belief that I really, truly do not want to be a project manager.

I got a fair bit of glossary work done yesterday, mostly because I said To hell with the paper sources and started looking for French definitions and English contexts and definitions online. The articles I'm using as parallel texts all assume that their readers already know what apoptosis is; I didn't. I guess it just goes to prove that a translator isn't looking for this stuff to understand the content, but rather to see how the terminology is applied and how the language goes together.

I should go to the lab and mess around with web pages and word count. It only took me about ten minutes last night to discover that it's possible to either convert HTML to RTF or just do word counts on the HTML directly. (I should have known translators would want a utility for that. Silly me.)

I wonder how hard it would be to create a mixed US-International and US Standard keyboard layout? I like what the US-International layout does with diacritical marks, but I wish it wouldn't do what it does with apostrophes and quotation marks. I suppose I should add that to the list of things to look into when I have nothing better to do, which is a completely different list from the one of things to do when I have income again.

What I did with my Wednesday

It's not all that hard to create keyboard layouts, as it turns out. (Anyone who wants to try it and is running Panther, go download Ukelele. Yes, it's spelled like that.) I haven't tried installing or running my experimental one yet, but I've made one, at least.

I made a cake tonight to take to the coffee hour tomorrow. I hadn't made this cake in years, even though it was my birthday cake through most of my teens. It tastes marvelous, and came out of the pan reasonably well, and I ate the bit that stuck for dessert. (Nobody'll miss it; the cake was baked in a tube pan and I was going to transport it in slices anyway.) There's something very satisfying about warm chocolate cake when it's snowing and you've been cold all day. I wonder if I can get creme de menthe in Kent? (The proper, as in birthday, way to eat this cake is with vanilla ice cream next to it and creme de menthe over both, since there's no frosting involved. It doesn't need any.)

It took me most of the afternoon to win a "there has to be a way to do this, dammit" argument with .phtml files, HTML to RTF, MS Word, Trados and Practicount. It would have been considerably easier in general if I had figured out earlier that if a filename has .phtml in it anywhere, I can change the name to anything I want as long as it ends in .phtml, and then the converter will do its thing. Instead, I went through several iterations of opening .phtml files in Notebook, swearing, trying to find the text buried in the code, swearing some more, saving the file as .txt, and hoping I could do something with it later. Of course, after I changed 130-odd filenames and got all 140-odd files converted to RTF, Trados decided it didn't like the RTF files, so I had to either spend another hour stripping the HTML-to-RTF advertising out of the files or run them through a different counting program. Which is why I used Practicount. I should strip the advertising anyway so I can run the files through Trados in the morning and find out whether Practicount was right when it said 32,217 words. (The pages aren't tremendously long, so it's possible. Some of them are only a picture and a link that says Previous Page.)

I think I also lost an argument with MultiTerm, or forgot something. I now have an input model for publications, but it keeps coming up where I don't want it and not coming up where I do. That, however, is a minor problem for the moment.