Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Feeling so much better today

Today's been busy, and I still have notes to do because I laid down in the bedroom for 'quiet time' and promptly fell asleep for four hours. I think I'm going to have to give up getting anything accomplished on Friday evenings--the week just catches up with me. Well, maybe Law & Order|UK, but I have to be in the mood to watch TV. But getting some rest really helped my mental health status, let me tell you.

Today I helped a friend use Google Translator to get the gist of many web pages. It's kind of nice to be the tech girl/personal librarian every now and then, even if I do grumble at times. And I learned some things about Google Translator, like the fact that it does well with Cyrillic script. I also learned that a particular Russian word which I do not know how to pronounce means 'year'. But I'll recognise it, I think, from now on. :) Since Russian and other Slavic languages are about the only Indo-European family I haven't toyed with at some point in my academic career, I was pretty much lost, but the program did a decent job. I wouldn't want to operate on anyone or fly an aeroplane according to translated instructions, but in a general way it's fun. There does seem to be a limit in size to the translation capability, however, without any real indication where it left off. I do like that you can hover over the translated text and see the original, both in translated webpages and in text typed into the system. That did help.

Okay, to those notes!

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