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Mar. 6th, 2020 08:34 amWorking from home today. no relation to either personal COVID exposure or office preparation procedures. No, I'm waiting for the plumber, who said he'd be here 'Friday morning'.
OTOH we have users testing the hardware necessary to make two weeks of working from home viable, or at least one user testing today and others taking the hardware home with them, so there's that.
Keeping an eye on the weather meanwhile to see if flight school's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm still coughing but not having the dangerous fits, so right now my big issue is the strong possibility of 15-16 mph winds with 25 mph gusts. I haven't flown in weeks and it is getting to me. Studying for the written exam is not the same at ALL. Being in the cockpit has WAY less chance of causing me to yell "AND THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO KOBE BRYANT'S PILOT!" if I get a question about visibility, flight conditions, cloud separation distance, scud running, warning systems, aircraft performance limitations, airspace restrictions, the Los Angeles airport area- seriously, there's a question on the written exam that deals with the licensing needed to fly out of a specific small airport within sneezing distance of LAX- or poor aeronautical decision making.
Wholly unrelated, my Instagram feed is driving me crazy. I have around 350-375 followers, most of whom I followed back. A not insignificant number of them are jewelry makers in the Middle East, or are Middle Eastern jewelry makers/sellers based elsewhere who cater to the same general ethnic audience. A good number of them are Iranian, either by current location or by point of origin. This is not in itself a problem, but what is driving me crazy is that the entirety of my foreign language education has been Italian (home classes, high school), Spanish (Sesame Street), French (5th grade homeroom teacher, the vocabulary necessary for cooking classes), Mandarin (a few classes), Ancient Greek (college courses), and Russian (not so much the language as the alphabet, which I taught myself largely out of spite after my senior year theology teacher said she'd be collecting our notebooks periodically to verify that we were taking notes; how was I supposed to know she could read the Cyrillic alphabet?). There is a woman in my office who has reasonable familiarity with Arabic, as she was born in Cairo and the family moved to America when she was still young, but she only has basic familiarity rather than reading fluency. She's offered to take written Arabic to her mother for translation if I need it, which I am grateful for, but what's driving me buggy is the fact that I can't tell written Arabic and written Farsi apart, and I don't want to put something in front of Julie and ask for her mother's help only to be told 'yeah, Mom says she doesn't speak Farsi'.
(I know Instagram has a 'show translation' feature. This does not help if the accounts post an image that has written words as part of the image rather than as a separate caption.)
Wonder how useful Duolingo is in learning either Farsi or Arabic. Esp. given that Julie indicated Arabic's dialect differentiation is on par with asking somebody from, like, Firenze to translate written Calabrese or Neapolitan dialect.
OTOH we have users testing the hardware necessary to make two weeks of working from home viable, or at least one user testing today and others taking the hardware home with them, so there's that.
Keeping an eye on the weather meanwhile to see if flight school's gonna happen tomorrow. I'm still coughing but not having the dangerous fits, so right now my big issue is the strong possibility of 15-16 mph winds with 25 mph gusts. I haven't flown in weeks and it is getting to me. Studying for the written exam is not the same at ALL. Being in the cockpit has WAY less chance of causing me to yell "AND THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO KOBE BRYANT'S PILOT!" if I get a question about visibility, flight conditions, cloud separation distance, scud running, warning systems, aircraft performance limitations, airspace restrictions, the Los Angeles airport area- seriously, there's a question on the written exam that deals with the licensing needed to fly out of a specific small airport within sneezing distance of LAX- or poor aeronautical decision making.
Wholly unrelated, my Instagram feed is driving me crazy. I have around 350-375 followers, most of whom I followed back. A not insignificant number of them are jewelry makers in the Middle East, or are Middle Eastern jewelry makers/sellers based elsewhere who cater to the same general ethnic audience. A good number of them are Iranian, either by current location or by point of origin. This is not in itself a problem, but what is driving me crazy is that the entirety of my foreign language education has been Italian (home classes, high school), Spanish (Sesame Street), French (5th grade homeroom teacher, the vocabulary necessary for cooking classes), Mandarin (a few classes), Ancient Greek (college courses), and Russian (not so much the language as the alphabet, which I taught myself largely out of spite after my senior year theology teacher said she'd be collecting our notebooks periodically to verify that we were taking notes; how was I supposed to know she could read the Cyrillic alphabet?). There is a woman in my office who has reasonable familiarity with Arabic, as she was born in Cairo and the family moved to America when she was still young, but she only has basic familiarity rather than reading fluency. She's offered to take written Arabic to her mother for translation if I need it, which I am grateful for, but what's driving me buggy is the fact that I can't tell written Arabic and written Farsi apart, and I don't want to put something in front of Julie and ask for her mother's help only to be told 'yeah, Mom says she doesn't speak Farsi'.
(I know Instagram has a 'show translation' feature. This does not help if the accounts post an image that has written words as part of the image rather than as a separate caption.)
Wonder how useful Duolingo is in learning either Farsi or Arabic. Esp. given that Julie indicated Arabic's dialect differentiation is on par with asking somebody from, like, Firenze to translate written Calabrese or Neapolitan dialect.
