Roadkill_Spatula's Xanga

Good is almost worse than bad

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:22:33 GMT

Man, I hate Quality Control.

I have two documents to review today. One is Spanish to English and is fairly simple. There aren't any errors in accuracy, and only a handful of grammatical and format mistakes. The work appears to be done by a competent translator.

The other more technical document is English to Spanish, and is done by an educated Spanish speaker who is an excellent translator. It includes very few accuracy errors.

But for some reason, the errors really get on my nerves in both cases. The first translator didn't insert hard page breaks, so there are lines that jump up to the bottom of the previous page. That wrinkles my rankle.

The second translated "specimens" as especímenes, which is not technically wrong, but the normal term is muestras. Likewise, all videos are referred to as cintas de video, video tapes, in spite of the fact that they are recorded on a DVD! Computer files are referred to as ficheros and expedientes, instead of the more common archivos. Come on, at least be consistent!

Arrrgh.

Don't eat the wobbly green bit

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:11:06 GMT

For some time, I have been hearing noises between the first and second floors of my house and in the attic over my bedroom. There are rat droppings in the garage, and I found an old plastic container of ferret vitamins gnawed to tiny slivers. A few weeks ago, I set glue traps in the garage by the washing machine where there's a section of wallboard missing.

A few days after I set the glue traps, one of them disappeared. I went to a store and looked for regular rat traps, but only found mouse traps. I bought a couple and set them in the area. When I checked shortly thereafter, they were sprung but empty.

Finally I climbed into the attic, which is two floors above the garage. There, near the chase that brings the a/c ducts from the furnace into the attic, was the glue trap. A section of glue was missing.

I stopped at Home Depot and bought two rat traps. I set one in the attic, baited with crunchy peanut butter. A few days later, I found a rat in it. The rat had a chunk of peanut clenched between its teeth.

My current home improvement project is to add a shower to my upstairs bathtub. One of the newly soldered pipe joints began to leak last week. While I was trying to solve that problem, I checked the laundry area (in the garage just below that bathroom) to see how much water had run down the wall. There was a trickle of water under the dryer. I pulled it out of the corner and discovered a decomposing rat carcass. Apparently it was the one that sprang the mousetraps, and one of the traps had killed it without trapping it.

During that time, I was also hearing very loud gnawing sounds from the attic. I set another rat trap (smooth peanut butter this time) and checked it every couple of days. Then the kids and I went to Birmingham for my niece's wedding. When I came back, I found a huge and somewhat redolent rat in the trap, his teeth coated with peanut butter.

Last night as I sat in my family room, I heard loud gnawing in the area underneath my upstairs bathroom, under the shower. I thumped on the ceiling, afraid that the rat would gnaw through the plumbing or something equally destructive. The gnawing noise ceased, but rustling continued.

This afternoon I'll stop on the way home and buy more rat traps for the garage and the attic. I think I'll go with crunchy peanut butter again. Once the garage rat is dead, I'll seal the wall behind the dryer. I think I'll also see whether I can close up the a/c chase.

Another handyman post

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:40:12 GMT

I spent Saturday at my friend Robin's, changing out the door between her house and the garage. Poor Robin; her house is built on the infamous black gumbo that underlies much of Grand Prairie and Arlington, and it bucks and jumps all over the place as the weather changes and the earth shifts. Olshan Engineering worked on it several times, but finally gave up. Right now the hallway walls lean a good inch to the west.

The door I tore out was a hollow plywood door, not the fire-rated door required by code for garage or exterior access. The opening was a good two inches larger than the door frame, which turned out to be a good thing, given how horribly out of plumb her house is. Whoever hung the old door used only three little triangles of wood as shims, two on the hinge side and one near the lock, so the frame had shifted around a fair amount in the opening. There was no insulation in all the empty space around the frame. A few years ago, I changed the threshold under the door, but the recent shifting of the house had left a gap between them.

Robin had bought a simple steel entry door at HD. I don't remember the brand, but it isn't Stanley, it's something made locally in Garland. It came prehung and with a steel threshold. HD describes it as "Basic Series Steel" on their website.

I cut six scraps of 1x4 to use as shims in the four corners and by the middle hinge and the doorknob. (I should have used two full-length 1x4s top to bottom, but all I had was one 6' piece.) I screwed them to the 2x4s before I stood the door between them. Fortunately, the floor in the door opening is very nearly plumb. I caulked the underside of the threshold before I set the door in place, to seal it to the floor. The opening, however, leans to the west, so the bottom hinge-side shim touched the door frame, as did the top doorknob-side shim. The other two corners had about a 1/2" gap. I used my finish nail gun to secure the door in place after it was plumbed up, and then used wedge-shaped shims at each of my six contact points to fill the gaps so I could screw the frame to the opening without skewing it. (I've seen carpenters actually use only finish nails to hang a door, without screws or even shims. Usually within a year or two, doors hung that way will develop problems.)

This drawing shows more or less what I have described. The black rectangles are the 1x4 shims, and the red ones are wedge shims where I installed screws. The door comes with four long screws to install through the three hinges to attach the hinge side of the frame to the opening. I used 3" sheetrock screw on the doorknob side.

I learn something new every time I hang a door. Those instruction papers can be right informative. This time I found out that I could hide the screws by putting them behind the weatherstripping. Who'd a thunk it? Why didn't the other doors' instructions mention that? Or did I never read that far before?

Once the door frame was securely fastened in the opening, and I had verified that the space between the door and frame was fairly even all around and that it opened and closed without rubbing, I installed the doorknob and the strike plate. The hardware had square corners and the cutouts on the new door had rounded corners, so it required very minor surgery with a utility knife to make the hardware fit.

I nailed up the trim on the inside first. Since the door opening is so big, the trim barely covered the gap. I had to shoot most of the nails at an angle to grab anything behind the trim. Wider trim would have been nice, but Robin didn't have any, and in any case I think she wants all the door trim in that hallway to match.

I stuffed insulation into the gaps and caulked the places that were too tight for insulation before I added the garage-side trim. Then I caulked all the seams and the finish nail holes. Done, and weather-tight, until the next time the house shifts and the door gets pushed out of square...

Be Comfortable. Buy Good Pants. 95% of Men Agree Bonobos Fit Better

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38:46 GMT

The title text was in an ad in the left margin of my Xanga front page. I found it amusing.

A sentimental fool

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:25:17 GMT

I planned my Nanowrimo novel to be further adventures of Bob and Mike, two creative and adventurous teens in the fictitious town of Rogersville. However, last night I fell into a melancholy funk, so I put on some of my favorite Spanish music and sat down to write about a different group of characters.

I've been dabbling with stories about a musical group that forms in my old college town of Lawrence, Kansas, around the guitar and vocal talents of a girl named Greta. At this point in my writing, Greta is taking extended maternal leave (two young children), so the rest of the band has split amicably and formed two new groups.

During last night's writing, the bass player/vocalist of the more successful of the groups has a crisis of sentimentality as a result of returning to South America for a relative's wedding. Upon his return to Lawrence, he gets caught up in homesickness and listening to and singing the soppy Latin songs of his youth, and has trouble focusing on his band's preparations for a major concert tour. The band's recording label has no interest in Spanish ballads; they want more of the successful sound the band has produced over the past couple of years, and to promote the new album that will be released to coincide with the tour.

The band's agent solves the bassist's quandary by booking gigs in a series of Hispanic clubs across the Southwest during the first part of the tour, in addition to the major venues in each city they will visit. After some resistance, the rest of the band indulges the bass player and tackles the challenge of learning and arranging a collection of Spanish ballads to perform in these clubs.

That's how far I got. Self-indulgent nonsense. But it was fun to write.

Pablo Escobar's home a theme park

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:34:51 GMT

Several months ago, I blogged about a family of hippos that escaped from Pablo Escobar's old property and was living in the wild. (See photo below of hippo shot by soldiers.) Today AOL has an article about the property becoming a theme park. (Click to read.)

Newborns cry in their native tongue

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:20:22 GMT

I just downloaded this from AOL.

Newborns Cry in Their Native Tongue

By CHARLES Q. CHOI

(Nov. 5) -- From their very first days, the cries of newborns already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, scientists now find.

French newborns tend to cry with rising melody patterns, slowly increasing in pitch from the beginning to the end, whereas German newborns seem to prefer falling melody patterns, findings that are both consistent with differences between the languages.

This suggests infants begin picking up elements of language in the womb, long before their first babble or coo.

Prenatal exposure to language was known to influence newborns. For instance, past research showed they preferred their mother's voice over those of others.

Still, researchers thought infants did not imitate sounds until much later on. Although three-month-old babies can match vowel sounds that adults make, this skill depends on vocal control just not physically possible much earlier.

However, when scientists recorded and analyzed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were three to five days old — 30 born into French-speaking families, 30 into German-speaking ones — their analysis revealed clear differences in the melodies of their cries based on their native tongue.

The way babies imitate melody patterns relies just on a command over their voiceboxes they had before birth, instead of the more advanced control of their vocal tracts they need for vowel sounds. As such, they can begin mimicking their mothers "at that early age," said researcher Kathleen Wermke, a medical anthropologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

"Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behavior in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding," Wermke said.

The researchers conjecture that the development of spoken language is rooted in melody, and that these findings support their idea. "Music and language might have co-evolved for a certain time during evolution and share a primordial form of communication system," Wermke told LiveScience.

The scientists detailed their findings online November 5 in the journal Current Biology.

Drunk at his own funeral

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:59:11 GMT

An article in El Tiempo reports that a Brazilian man turned up drunk at his own funeral. He went to the cemetery and found his family about to bury what they thought were his remains. Apparently someone had died in a traffic accident, and his family identified the mangled body as his. To top it off, his landlord, thinking he was dead, burned his clothes and bedding...

Jiggety-jig

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:32:07 GMT

This has been a frustrating day for blogging. Xanga has been giving me fits, not wanting to show comments, not wanting to post my comments, truncating them, not letting me pulse, not letting me blog. Just now I clicked on the editor not working link and brought up an older version of the text editor. Now I can finally type.

As the title indicates, I'm back, after four weeks away. It was good to get home, even though as usual it smelled of cat pee and there were spots on the tile where one of the cats had thrown up. (I have a neighbor who comes over to tend to them while I'm gone.) We celebrated Rebecca's birthday Sunday evening at my house. I grilled chicken and pork ribs and made lemonade, and in the bustle of getting the meal together, forgot to bake a cake. Fortunately, Rebecca's not that into sweet foods, so she didn't mind. We just put a candle in her bowl of ice cream, sang, and brought out the gifts.

The items I picked up in San Salvador go nicely with my bright dining room decor. I already had a big painted fish and a collection of Panamanian molas of birds, so I picked up two little wooden dishes painted with animals, and two paintings of macaw parrots. There is also a big red stuffed cloth macaw to hang in the corner. I wish I had taken more cash to the tourist market; I would have bought twice as much. If I go to El Salvador again, I'll pick up a toucan to go with the parrot.

Here at the office, I had awaiting me: 126 e-mails, two big job-related surveys, my annual performance review, a hearing test, my travel expenses to voucher, and a collection of transcripts to edit. I finished the last of those things this afternoon, so now I can blog in peace without feeling guilty. My supervisor surprised me with an Outstanding performance review; I've been so unmotivated this year that it didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything.

Got an e-mail from a coworker: the hotel where we stayed in Chile (when I went down there to interpret for a fingerprint course) was the target of a bombing attack this week. They think it was a Chilean anarchist group. Sounds like a novel from 100 years ago. I didn't know there were still bomb-using anarchists.

I decided to go for Nanowrimo this year. A couple of my daughters have done it in the past, although I don't think either finished. I plan to bring together a few rough drafts of short stories and knit them into a reasonably coherent novel.

Got to see the new goats at Rebecca's house. My son had written that Billy Bob looks like a wildebeest. He does indeed. I'll try to post a picture soon. A new nanny, Molly, generates a couple of gallons of milk a week, so they haven't bought store milk in a month.

Can't think of much else to report. Have a great evening. I'm off to Bible study.

This is supposed to be a post, but I can't type in the text box. Used to live in this house.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:18:42 GMT