all things me

Tomorrow I can finally start using my new phone! It’s SIM locked so I’ve had to wait for the new subscription to start working. I suppose I’ve had to wait this long because they’re moving it from a different provider. Quite odd that it takes so long because already on Monday someone from the current/ex provider called me asking why I was changing. I told him I bought a package deal and he said, quite sourly, that I’ll be stuck with it for the next 2 years (not with those words but I got the gist). I should’ve told him that ‘maybe so, but boy do I have a fancy phone now’.
[edit Oct 17] Actually, there is apparently a one-week “reconsideration period”. Therefore, I had to wait. [/edit]

I’m planning on buying protective film for the screen (if it seems like it won’t leave horrible sticky patches when removed) and headphones (I’d like the HS-20+AD-41 if it’s available) tomorrow before the lecture. Now they had at looong last (the shop opened in August) added the opening hours for Nokia store so if I get to the city around 9 am I’ll have plenty of time to shop.

Now, to carry both phones or risk it and leave the new one at home? I have no idea when the old subscription will stop working. Then again, there is pretty much a non-existing chance that someone would try and call me so I guess it won’t do much harm if my old subscription stops working in the middle of the day. Or, I could just carry the SIM card with me…

The colour is more realistic and the chair does look more comfy. And you know why the picture’s better?

That’s right. I caved in, surrendered, gave up… I bought Nokia N73.

Actually, I did something worse — I got a package deal! I hate package deals. They make people’s lives way too easy. But it allowed me to take the phone home without paying a dime. Sure, I’ll have to pay a whole lotta dimes each month but I figured it’s not a bad deal because in the end, the phone usage (calls and data, I pay for SMSs per message) is not a big part of the monthly fee. And I was planning on changing service providers anyway.

The subscription isn’t working yet because they have to move my number from the current provider but the phone works anyway. It’s good, because now I can play with it and learn it first without having to be afraid that I’m using something that costs a lot.

First impression: I’m loving it!
(I’ll elaborate once I’ve actually used the phone for a while.)

Note to self: Try and postpone buying a memory card until the MU-36 (2GB) is available in Q4/2006. Why wait when you can buy a 2Gb Kingston miniSD right now with less money.

… would they throw me in jail?

That wasn’t one of the questions I asked when I went to the travel agency this morning. I did ask about the Bunch o’ Papers^TM (now I know which one of them is The Ticket — it’s not the one saying “Receipt Duplicate Copy”) and also got a Visa because I couldn’t find a way to get one through the website. So, now I have the Visa — or actually an Electronic Travel Authority. I was also given a cool plastic pouch where I can keep all the important documents.

I did ask if I needed any extra vaccinations because the plane stops in Singapore (I guess some countries require vaccinations etc. if one changes planes there…? I don’t know!). There are no mandatory vaccinations to take before being allowed to enter Australia.

Next step: Travel insurance
I’d only bought luggage insurance via the website (because there was a checkbox for it!) and hadn’t thought about getting an insurance for myself. (Who cares about me as long as my clothes and books are safe!) So, now I’ve got a bill I can pay if I want to and I’ll get the insurance in the mail. The price isn’t awful. Sounds good to me.

For the whole story, see category Tourist of Oz.

I work in localisation among other areas of translation and I know it’s very tempting to re-use texts that one might think are “the same”. (What a money-saver it is, too!)

If only it was that simple.

One problem is caused by the grammatical gender. Here’s a simple example from a text I was working on today (it won’t give anything away): the word “Saved” — that was the whole UI string. In English and many other languages it can easily be translated and re-used without a problem. But in for example Spanish (I pick a language I know) you need to know what has been saved because the adjective/past participle is inflected depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine (salvado or salvada respectively). You can’t use the same 7-character string in all contexts; I suppose most of the time it would just be annoying, in worst cases it might even be confusing.

Just now I borrowed an eBook from the library and looked at the file properties in Adobe Reader 7.0. Here’s what the window looks like:

I’ve circled the word Tulostetaan (Finnish). In an English program I’m sure it would say “Printing”, that is “Printing is allowed/not allowed”. The word can also be used when you print a page and the program lets you know that it’s busy doing something by displaying “Printing” or perhaps “Printing…” with animated fullstops. The words do look the same but they don’t mean the same. The problem in Finnish (and other languages) is that, if translated correctly, the words do not look the same. “Tulostetaan” can be used in letting us know that the program is busy but not in this context. Here the word ought to be “Tulostaminen”.

Usually recycling is encourageable — not in localisation I’m afraid.

Addition, Thu 5th October

I don’t know what has “gone wrong” with the above localisation, and I don’t know if the two (or more) strings are perceived as the same (i.e. use the same resource) or if they just have been copied to save money/time/trouble. They shouldn’t be perceived as the same because they clearly aren’t. Some problems could perhaps be solved if at least words that are of different parts-of-speech would be separated from one another (noun printing vs. gerund printing). Perhaps they are. Do remember that I don’t know a thing about application development or the inner workings of Windows applications (among others) so I have no idea what’s going on under the hood.

I suppose WordPress functions similarly (“the wrong way”) because it uses GNU Gettext framework where texts are translated on message level. At closer look it does look like the context is taken into account, though, so problems like in this example on multiple meanings of “post” are avoided. Way to go!

The library website for our capital city area started offering eBooks in July this year. The collection is still quite small and seems to include only non-fiction books at the moment.

I like the idea though. Of course, I wouldn’t read a 400-500-page Stephen King on the computer screen but for example the CSS guide I test-borrowed works better than well as an eBook. (It is a silly beginner’s book but I just wanted to glance through it quickly.)

A downside is that there (currently) is no way to book an eBook (ha ha). The loan periods are 1 day and 7 days (I think I saw 3 days, too) and you see how long a loan lasts, but because the book can be returned before the loan period is over there is no way to anticipate when a book might be available. And often someone snatches it first. That happened with the CSS book. Every time I went to check, the book was loaned for 5 more days or 2 more days. With books that have more than one copy available this isn’t much of a problem.

Can’t complain though, don’t really have a reason to either, because it’s all completely free (except for the electricity) and very convenient.

I received an envelope from the travel agency today and it contained a lot of papers. White papers, yellow papers, important looking papers, for-my-information papers…

I’m all confused about which papers I actually need to take with me on the trip and will the people at the airports really believe that they are official papers. They don’t look very official. I was expecting a wonderfully thick booklet of all the different plane tickets I’d need (well, only 2 and 2) but now I only have a receipt, an itinerary, electronic ticket/receipt/itinerary, and I printed an eTicket Receipt Duplicate Copy which sounds very shady.

I think I’ll go to the travel agency on Thursday to get my head screwed on straight and get all these papers sorted out — I should be able to get the Visa through them so I get two birds with one stone. Now that I think about it, maybe I get more official papers after check-in.

I really wanted a thick plane ticket booklet that I could laminate or frame…