a wolf angel is not a good angel

As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained.

Translate!

I have a decision to make.

I have lots of them, but one that is relevant right now: what will I be doing come September? (I do not actually want to be a glass artisan. At least not full-time.)

Option 1: continue working where I am now. This is not an ideal option; this is all but a clerical job, and I’m not gaining any real skills with it.
Option 2: speak to them about working as a programmer. This is also not ideal, because I don’t have any programming skills at all, and I’m not sure I can learn them fast enough on the job to keep one.
Option 3: find some other job. Well, if I’m lucky.
Option 4: go to school for 1 year (8 months classes, 4 months stage) learn programming techniques. A few good things: it’s well-regarded in Montreal and they often hire people from this program based on “hey, who here is good”; I’d have 4 months (15 weeks, really) job experience that’s paid; I’d become totally fluent in French. I’m just ready not to be in school for a while. (Tuition and fees would be about 2500-3000 for the year.)

I’m leaning to 4, because it seems to be best for my long-term plans, but I’m so tired of school school school. On the other hand, anything else is likely to turn into a dissatisfying job, and if I’m going to go back to school, I’d like to do it now so I can then get a good job that pays well and buy a house.

I don’t know. I guess I’ll see. Maybe I jsut need some time away from thinking before I can decide: I have until July 15 to respond to the school.

Today the Olympic Flame went through town.

(Someone changed my settings from the best possible to the worst possible — smallest, lowest quality — so the photo is terrible. I exchanged email addresses with a nice couple from Halifax, so if I’m lucky, I’ll get something nice they took.)

I decided to go to Old Montreal (where my class was) early, wander around the old port (where I took more good photos with terrible image quality — but I will go back and take better ones in 2 weeks), wait along Notre Dame and watch the flame go by. As it turned out, I was at a place where they exchanged runners. It was fun. They gave us all flags and free drinks. How often do you get to see the Olympic torch relay?

I had quite the lovely day.

Glass fusion was lots of fun. I would love to get into it a bit (lot) more. Today’s projects are just in the kiln now, so I’ll post photos tomorrow. I have plans for them, and plans for more projects, too, if I could figure out how to fuse them myself (at the store, which rents out the kiln). Kaleidoscope wheels fused? Yes, I think so.

Glass fusion is surprisingly technical (well, surprising if you don’t think about it at all before you start). Since glass — like all materials — expands as it heats up, you need to be careful what glass you put together. For instance, I used Bullseye glass, which has a COE (coefficient of expansion) of 90. Julie who was also taking the class used Spectrum, COE 96, and Dolores brought her own handblown beautiful beautiful glass, COE 98. Within 2 points, you can usually mix glass, so she used a Spectrum 96 base.

The coefficient of expansion is how much the glass expands per degree celsius the temperature is raised. So my glass expands 90×10^-7 — which means that if I had glass that was 10cm long, if I raised the temperature 10 degrees, it would be 10.000009cm long. You need to use glass that heats at the same rate. First of all, you’re raising it to 1000 degrees (celsius) — this will end up making a difference. Glass attached to other glass of a different COE will end up breaking.

You need to warm it up slowly at first, so that you don’t end up with molten edges and a solid centre (or, in other words, a broken piece). You need to cool it down slowly, too, otherwise you’ll end up with crystals forming, and the glass will be opaque and ugly. Fusing takes a long, long time.

And prechecked glass — glass that’s been checked to see that it’s self-compatible, that the colours don’t turn when you cook them — is expensive. Red is the worst, of course (made with gold oxides), so I used it for accents. Still, because we only 3, we had lots of kiln space, so we all could make lots of projects. And one of us worked very small, one only did one thing, and I was the third, so I will have 11 projects (7 small, 4 medium). At least 3 of them (small) are boring, but I learned.

One of the things I like about fusing is that you don’t need to grind down your pieces. depending on what you’re doing, you don’t need to cut them too precisely, either — the edges will melt, anyways. And also you can’t wear stained glass as jewelry, you can wear fused glass as jewelry. I would like to buy some dichroic and make some fused dichroic jewelry . . . I want my own kiln, really. I want to see what hotter or cooler or longer or shorter times & temperatures do . . . I want to make stuff for jewelry and bracelets (bracelets!). I want to make beads. (Lukcily, Julie in the class also does, as does a friend of mine, so we might manage to get a class running.)

There is a class on fusion & slumping. Slumping means making your flat glass unflat, by melting it into molds for bowls or vases or sushi dishes. I want to take this class, too — possibly in July when it’s first offered. How much fun! I’ve always loved those glass bowls. This is another thing I could use a home kiln for. See how useful it would be?

My grandmother is better. Not better in the sense that she’ll be out of the hospital any time soon, but better in the sense that her heart is now working normally. The pneumonia is not responding so much, but the heart was more crucial. I keep hearing the medical information third-hand, through a bunch of non-medical people, so this is probably altogether wrong. Except fot the part where she’s doing better — I might not be sure how well better is (or how bad it was before), but anything is good.

This morning my mother, after telling me my grandmother was better, said she was in part relieved because it means we will be able to go to Maine next weekend for the holiday. And I thought, oh I guess it wasn’t that bad that I was hoping that if my grandmother had to die, she’d wait until after I finished my fusion class.

We’re not quite as heartless as all that. Though my grandmother and mother . . . don’t get along well. My mother is not what my grandmother wanted for her first son.

I am relieved she’s better. We might have a distant relationship, but I don’t wish her badly. And certainly I don’t wish his mother’s death on my father.

I finished my design for my next glass piece. I’ve ordered a strip cutter, so I can only make the top now, which is irritating. Still within a week or two I’ll have everything I need to actually make the bottom too. And jewels for the kaleidoscope I’m going to make next. I adore kaleidoscopes. They were my initial motivation for going into glass, though I find boxes are somewhat more satisfying.

I like the design. I have all the glass for it, and I think it’s going to look good. I’ve got good glass and it works well in the design. (No scanner, but I might later photograph the drawing I have.)

I’m debating whether or not I should go for a light box. In theory I could make one, but in practice it might just be easier to get one. Or find a glass table and just put a light under it. That one might not be a brilliant plan. I really wish I had a photocopier.

I need to photocopy the design, get something to start saving designs in (one day I might regret not having any of the stuff I designed in the past), and buy some electrical tape. Then I can figure out what glass goes with which piece in the design (it’s a turtle shell, so each bit of the shell will be a different piece of glass. I have 11 pieces. I’m not sure how many different kinds of glass I have for the top.) I also need to buy a mini saw.

After I align glass with design, I’ll draw the shapes of each piece onto the piece of glass. I then cut out the pieces of glass (20 for the top total — a simple design). I’ll then try to slot them together so I can see where I need to grind them down. I’ll give more details about the process as I go through it. There don’t seem to be other glass blogs, anyways.

Anyone want to give me a gmail invite, out of the goodness of their heart?

From the Linguist List:

Our new and improved English dialect survey is now ready for the taking at:

http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/survey/

This survey contains about 550 questions, compared to 120 in the one we ran last year. It also enables us to map responses from outside the contintental US, so we will be including maps for Canada and Great Britain as soon as we receive a sufficient number of responses. As before, all of the questions are suitable for consumption by non-linguists.

It’s the fun sorts of questions like “what’s the word for what water comes out of in a sink?” or “how do you pronounce marry, merry and Mary?” Plus the map results are cool.

Strange little news item:

French fries may be the bane of low-carb diets and obesity foes, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a federal judge in Texas have another name for the popular food: fresh vegetable.

U.S. District Judge Richard Schell last week endorsed little-noticed changes by the USDA to federal regulations that govern what defines a fresh vegetable. The changes were made at the behest of the french-fry industry, which has spent the last five decades pushing for revisions to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act.

Frying potato strips is just cosmetic. (And what a fascinating name for an institute.)

The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under the law to include batter-coated, frozen french fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.

My definition of fresh food is not the legal definition, but mine at least verges on reasonable.

Tim Elliott, a Chicago attorney who recently challenged the revision in a Texas federal courtroom on behalf of a bankrupt food distributor, said defining french fries as fresh vegetables defies common sense.

“I find it pretty outrageous, really,” said Elliott, who argues that the Batter-Coating Rule is so vague that chocolate-covered cherries, packed in a candy box, would qualify as fresh fruit.

“This is something that only lawyers could do,” he said, pointing to a stack of legal documents debating the french-fry rule change. “There must be 100 pages there about something you could summarize in one paragraph: batter-coated french fries are not fresh vegetables.”

Among the documents cited in the lawsuit is a patent from french-fry maker Lamb Weston — which has a Twin Falls processing plant — on how to make batter-coated fries.

“After partial dehydration, the potato strips are coated with an aqueous slurry,” the patent says. “The aqueous starch enrobing slurry … is comprised of a combination of chemically modified ungelatinized potato starch, chemically modified ungelatinized cornstarch, rice flour and other optional ingredients.”

“Fresh vegetables are not typically associated with ‘aqueous starch enrobing slurries,”‘ Elliott wrote in court documents.

See, frying to me is processing. And cooking them. So they’re not fresh, or fresh-but-then-frozen, which I assume the law is meant to cover as well.

“They fall into the category of fresh because they are not processed,” said agency spokesman George Chartier. “They are not transformed in the sense of being cooked.”

Though a USDA news release announcing the revision says caramel-coated apples also will be considered fresh fruit under the Batter-Coating Rule, officials say the gooey treats would not be included because coating it changes the character of the fruit and makes it a candy.

Frying and battering potato strips, however, does not change the character of a potato, they argued.

Last week, my grandmother’s back hurt. She went to the hospital, where they said things were fine and sent her home. Two days later, she was in even more pain. My mother brought her to the hospital; she had pneumonia and there was an abcess and other fairly gross stuff, and they haid to drain the fluid out from wherever it had leaked to. (We’re not sure how they didn’t notice the pneumonia and stuff the first time she saw the doctor.) After that, it was still no better, and she had surgery two days ago. The first day she seemed fine. Now — she’s just not getting better. Her heart’s beating too fast . . . probably other things I don’t know about.

My mother just went off to visit her. My father’s been going once or twice or three times a day. My mother today told me I should probably visit her soon. My father said the doctor says my grandmother is very sick — she was already not particularly well (diabetic), she’s old, and it’s a severe form of pneumonia. My father has interpreted this as the cat’s on the roof; I’m not sure how true this is.

I’m going to visit her this evening. I’ve only gone once. I’ve been bad (though it only started looking bad late yesterday or, really, today, she’s still been in hospital for quite a while).

I feel guilty about this. I feel guilty abotu the fact that we’re estranged — yes, it was entirely their fault when they stopped seeing us much (from twice a month to twice a year) when I was about 11, but I’m not 11, and I don’t much enjoy spending time with them (as opposed to my maternal grandparents) and I never bothered to change things. I feel guilty that I don’t particularly like them, or think of them often. (Though since she’s been sick I have been asking regularly after her.) I don’t dislike my grandparents, they’re just not a big part of my life.

I feel like I should care more about this, or be more worried than I am, or something, somehow.