Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Scratch Pad April 17

9:36 AM:

Okay — now I’m finding deliberate misspellings that are defined as “a popular misspelling of [correct spelling].” Hold me back…

11:20:

I’ve been driving through a thousand words this morning at an impressive speed, and have suddenly crashed into level 15. Hereonin things will crawl, mainly because there are three times as many words in a level thanks to the supplementary dictionary I vetted two weeks ago. Now I have to pay attention to all my markings and code them appropriately, as well as addressing the nine hundred-odd words that were in this level of the main file which I haven’t yet seen.

12:38:

It just took me five minutes to figure out where the scroll lock key was on this French keyboard. How I originally hit it, I do not know. Maybe I used a keyboard shortcut combo unknowingly. But my Excel sheet mysteriously wouldn’t move the way I needed it to move for a half hour until “scroll lock?” occured to me.

13:24:

“Caliph: a Muslim ruler” is right after “callipers”. Because I see them at the same time, for a moment I think, “Why do Muslims have their own measuring sticks?”

14:07:

GERMANIUM! Everyone grab your zone purifiers!

14:34:

Cross-eyed. Officially cross-eyed. DL 15 is wearing me down, because I’m doing three different things simultaneously.

14:40:

Overheard: “No! Fun first, learning second! We want them to learn words by accident, because they’re having fun!”

14:42:

This one’s for Liam — “Noddle: the head of a person, or their ability to think.”

14:48:

Uh-oh. Crashing.

16:46:

Almost three thousand words today. Gah. No wonder the brain is leaking out my ears.

New word(s): adumbrate, massif, meretricious, stochastic. (The higher the level of dictionary, the rarer the word, you see. So theoretically I should be learning more the higher I go.)

Scratch Pad, April 16

More stream of consciousness joy:

10:45 AM:

I am going to reward myself with the two-volume shorter Oxford dictionary after this contract, to help take the bad taste of poorly constructed reference books out of my mouth.

11:12:

I am convinced that this dictionary was written by people who thought they knew the definitions and didn’t actually look them up, because the ones that aren’t dead-on are kind of but not really right. Or they’re defined as the general populace understands them, which is not the textbook definition. I am appalled that this thing got published.

11:17:

I am also tired of correcting figurative use when the literal definition should be there first.

11:28:

No, I’ve got it: it reads as if it was assembled by schoolchildren who inferred the meaning of a word by its use in a piece of text. Therefore, someone reading the phrase “sunnier climes” might infer that “climes” means different or variable weather, as this dictionary says. Except it actually means climate.

11:33:

Does one “believe in a religion”? Doesn’t one believe in the doctrines, and follow the religion?

12:47 PM:

Looking up “pacemaker” to see if the definition requires finessing, I discover that “An external pacemaker was designed and built by the Canadian electrical engineer John Hopps in 1950 based upon observations by cardio-thoracic surgeon Wilfred Bigelow at Toronto General Hospital. A substantial external device using vacuum tube technology to provide transcutaneous pacing, it was somewhat crude and painful to the patient in use and, being powered from an AC wall socket, carried a potential hazard of electrocution of the patient by inducing ventricular fibrillation.” I’ll bet. (Thanks, Wiki.)

13:17:

Continuing the thought of 11:28 and 11:17, above — “Tether”: “having no strength or patience left”. Obviously inferred from “at the end of one’s tether”. Argh!

13:41:

From HRH, on the subject of me being too shy and lame to ask someone I don’t know to escort me in and out of the office while my keycard is non-functional: “You’re not lame, remember you’re a hot lady in an office of guys. Ask and they will comply, Ph34r t3h cut3, resistance is futile and all that.” Me: “Who are you, and what have you done with my husband?”

15:05:

Mellanmouse takes good, good care of me. I have hot chocolate and a reactivated keycard. I am no longer a prisoner. Now I can listen to Evanescence instead of the soothing Loreena McKennitt I was relying upon to keep me balanced earlier. I love her with much love.

15:24:

Looking up “exponent”, I found this example: “Jaqueline du Pré was a leading exponent of cello-playing”. I like it when my world and the world of this imaginary dictionary intersect.

15:28:

The serial comma is your friend. Do not fear the serial comma!

15:53:

Every once in a while we hear howlers from some part of the room as the team members test code to see if it functions. Some of the definitions that are pulled up are insanely incorrect. Some of them I’ve found so far; others are yet to come.

14:22:

I think what frustates me most is how *close* some of these definitions are, and yet how they still miss the mark. For example, to admonish is kind of like “to advise someone to do something”, but it lacks the implication of warning. If someone learned this word in the context for which I’m refining these definitions, they’d use it incorrectly. And I refuse to let that happen.

16:24:

I AM FINDING WORDS THAT DO NOT EXIST!

New word(s) today: pelmet.

Also? Yay me for remembering my grandmother’s birthday.

Friday

Well, the second week of work has drawn to a close. I’m not as exhausted as I was last Friday, but then, I’ve learned how to pace myself a bit better.

Today’s new luncheon location: Soy, where I had delicious plate of shrimp in a pepper/salt tempura. Excellent. Now we get to revisit these choice places, because my contract has been officially extended for an entire month.

Yes, you may cheer. We all did.

Today I began keeping a scratch pad of running commentary during the day to entertain myself and clear my brain of some of what was piling up there while I worked. For posterity (noun: “people in the future”; or really, in this case, just myself in the future), then, here are those notes:

10:30 AM:

I am currently editing the highest level of the dictionary while waiting for a spreadsheet merge. Some of the definitions are too long and won’t fit in the display field properly, so these are the ones I’m fixing now. It’s like a puzzle or challenge: how can I rewrite the definition, keeping it as clear and as unchanged as possible, and still get it under the specified length? Sometimes I can do it right away, other times it takes two or more attempts. When I do succeed, there’s a little “Yes!” that escapes me, and sometimes a small sedate victorious punch of the air above my keyboard. (“Gerrymandering” just took me six goes, the longest yet. But I conquered it in the end.)

11:16 AM:

I talk to myself a lot now. I read definitions out loud. The guys around me are politely ignoring me, or maybe they’re just too involved in whatever they’re working on to notice me mumbling under my breath. Everyone else does it, after all, and some not so quietly.

11:24 AM:

Hojicha green tea is a lousy substitute for the chocolate I’m craving.

3:00 PM:

Part of my problem about working with these definitions is that abbreviations or variants have come to popularly mean something unrelated to the original. I want to include the origin or related info, and can’t, so people will never know that “bedlam” (“a noisy lack of order”) has come to mean this because it originally referred to the chaotic noise made by the residents of Bedlam, a mental institution in London, which in its turn is an abbreviation of Bethlem Hospital, which is in its own turn a mangling of the original St Mary of Bethlehem.

3:36 PM:

… Or “eureka”, which now is used as an exclamation of success, but which actually means “I have discovered it” in Greek. Not the same thing at all.

3:43 PM:

Proofreading “gerbil” reminds me of the little brown mouse Blade and I saw making a mad dash across the lobby of the metro station the other morning. It looked like a brave mousy dare — although if so, it lost points for trying to cut a corner too closely and scurrying into the shiny turnstile column, but regained them by bouncing, shaking itself off, and then carrying on.

Today’s new words: invidious, reticulation.

Cue the Carols

To quote t!: “I’m… dreaming… of a white… Victoria Day Weekend…”

This post-Easter snowstorm made my commute home absolute misery, starting with the hour and ten minutes I stood outside waiting for a lift that only arrived (of course) after I resorted to public transit. While I was cold and wet and miserable, the worst thing was not knowing where HRH and Liam were and if they were okay. Both parties got home within five minutes of one another, and Liam was surprisingly not insane from being cooped up for two and a half hours in the car. He even ate some dinner before bed. HRH was mildly spare, however, and I was completely unhinged of course, imagining horrible things. This weekend, I am buying HRH a cellular phone.

Work proceeds apace. True to Meallanmouse‘s prediction today, I was asked how much longer I thought the project would take me should my contract be extended. As I’ve already been separately spoken to by the two heads who hired me about the near certainty of said extension, we shall see what happens tomorrow. Apparently it would be all right if I worked at home two days a week, which makes life much easier because HRH is working out on the West Island Mondays and Tuesdays, and needs to be on-site by the time Liam’s caregiver opens shop, as well as requiring the car to get there (otherwise it’s something like a two-hour commute). This way I can drop HRH off, then Liam, come home and work, then pick them up. If I had to go in to work on-site I’d lose an hour and a half of work time, assuming I took the car. Working at home on those two days is simply more efficient.

I learn at least one new word a day on this project. And it turns out I have been misusing “pursuant” all these years.

On today’s lunch adventure, Mellanmouse introduced me to the best fries I’ve had since the Frite Pit changed ownership over twenty years ago. Yesterday, it was an awesome Greek pita in the company of HRH and Fearsclave. Who knows what tomorrow will be?

I read A Long Shadow earlier this week, and am now over halfway through Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (astute and obsessive readers may remember this as one of the topics that popped into my brain last fall and began scratching at the windows, whining for attention, pining to be a YA historical).

There is more; I keep a scratch pad with ideas that occur to me as the day goes along, but I’m really tired and still cold from the damp, no matter how many socks and sweaters I put on. To bed.

Day Off

I’m glad it’s a holiday weekend and I have an extra day off. Conversely, this takes a day off what I’ll be invoicing the company for this contract. On Friday I tried to e-mail the file to myself from the work address to put some time into it today, but it hasn’t come through. I have a feeling the corp filters may have decided it was Not Allowed because another message without attachments I sent made it to my home inbox. Ah well; I tried.

Band was impressively awesome on Saturday. Easter dinner over at HRH’s parental home was lovely on Sunday. Sleeping in until seven this morning was blissful.

There is surprisingly little chocolate in the house. This ought to be remedied.

We went out this morning for groceries and other stuff, and I finally found a cap for Liam despite his stubborn refusal to try them on. This one appears to be acceptable; at least he keeps it on his head half the time right now. All four of Liam’s molars are making white bumps on his back gums, as HRH found out when he braved the Toddler Jaws of Doom to put Orajel on them yesterday. No wonder the poor child is cranky.

Scattershot

Thought I’d kicked the cold; then the really bad dry throat thing kicked in yesterday afternoon, triggering really bad coughing fits complete with tears streaming from the eyes. HRH had to import the humidifer from Liam’s room into our bedroom so that I could sleep last night. Also no fun were the sharp, incredibly painful foot cramps that attacked after I stepped onto the cold bathroom tiles on my way to bed. So, I’m still sick. Also, it is winter again, and I would like these two things to be over and done with, thank you.

Still enjoying work in an intellectual/practical challenge sort of way. More with the tearing of the hair and exasperated gestures and sighs, though, as I encounter words that I expect to be nouns and that are defined as verbs, such as ‘paint’. That’s all right; I fit right in with the gesticulation and random oaths uttered by programmers and coders around me.

Thanks to public transport this week, I have read Conspiracy by Grace, Lady Cavendish; Melusine by Sarah Monette; and The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason in their entirety.

t! has been sharing excellent music with me lately. I’m currently enjoying some Lee Rocker and Brian Setzer Orchestra live recordings. Rockabilly and swing revival are seeing me through.

All right; time to pack the Thermos of tea and finish getting ready to go.

Wednesday

Poor Liam; those two-year-old molars are really bothering him this week. Today he slept dreadfully during his nap, and he’s already woken up crying once tonight. Normally I wait until it sounds like he really is awake and needs reassuring, and nine times out of ten he falls asleep on his own again, but tonight I went in not long after he called for me and cried briefly, even though it sounded like he was settling down again. We snuggled in the armchair together and he fell asleep almost immediately. I sat there with this long boy on my lap in the dark, his head on my shoulder, feeling his warmth and his weight, and wondering when my baby became a boy. It’s been ages since I cuddled him back to sleep; it’s not something I do often, but tonight I just wanted to be with him for a bit.

I attended my first group meeting at work this afternoon. I learned a lot: namely the new delivery schedule, key personnel shifts, and so forth, and am now a lot more aware of how the project is structured and what it entails, as well as gaining a better idea of What It Means (to the market, to the end user, to the company, etc.). I am in absolute awe of this producer who juggles the entire show, and juggles it with poise. Two platforms, both still relatively new, QA, product testing, basic design, the needs of the administration, the needs of the team, the needs of the market… he’s a very capable, principled, and well-grounded man. I also learned that everyone in the room is a member of the team. There are about forty people. This is a small team compared to other projects in the company, I know, but I hadn’t realised the extent of the manpower required. I simply hadn’t thought about it before.

I finished cutting a ruthless swathe of pink-highlighted-destruction through the supplemental dictionary today, and began to look at the main dictionary for words to strike out and/or edit. I am already tearing my hair out — it has ‘backward’ and ‘backwards’ (well, not any more, because I marked one for deletion because of its derogatory definition), but not ‘forward’. I’m suffering from a lot of double takes and “you can’t be serious” and “wha?” sorts of gestures and utterings of exasperation. (There was a mild ripple of relief that ran through some of the team when I was obliquely introduced as the contractor bringing the dictionary up to par during the meeting. Every hour I am there I come to better understand why this reaction is common when I am introduced and my purpose is made known.)

One of the benefits of working in a mostly male environment is that the women’s bathrooms are always empty. And clean.

Note to self: Don’t wear the zip-up stacked heel ankle boots to work again. They have hard soles, and they click when I walk. (See above re: mostly male environment. I’m uncomfortable with the high-heel click, especially since I tend to walk quickly or decisively, and these are mainly hardwood floors. Loud noise tends to call attention to she who makes it, and I’m not big on the calling attention thing.)

I got lost trying to find the cafeteria to fetch hot water for tea today. Thank goodness for helpful maintenance staff.

One of the neat things about working on-site for this contract is that Meallanmouse and I make a point of walking out of the building every day for lunch. So far she has introduced me to three excellent restaurants with very affordable lunch specials and delicious food (bonus: all healthy). Otherwise I would be eating at my desk and that is bad for my brain, my productivity, and my health, quite frankly. Hurrah for friends who poke me, and keep me social and clear-minded.

Enough; bath, and bed.