Casu Consulto

I'm trying to find a design for a business card (just a simple calling card, really, something I can hand out to people with my contact info on it), and I can't find anything that I really like. I was looking at moo.com, but it's like, 25 EUR for 100 cards, and if I go with something in Poland, it's like 10 PLN (about 3 EUR). Except that none of them are really catching my eye and yelling "me, me! pick me!" *sigh* I'd try designing my own, but my design-anything mojo is thoroughly dead these days and everything I try to do ends up looking like crap. I should try and get the website up and running before I do up the business cards - so I dunno, they can have some consistency - but every time I sit down to do it, I end up poking at WordPress for a few minutes and then getting distracted by something else. I went on a long-ish bike ride with G. on Saturday, and oh boy, am I ever out of shape. Actually, I'd go so far as to say I have no shape (as opposed to being in or out of one). Add "get out and move some more" to the neverending list of things I need to do. Although I guess it could have been worse - I get tired quickly, especially riding in the sun, which exhausts me no matter what I'm doing, and I'm still having trouble with my throat, so breathing through the mouth = dry throat = coughing = too many stops on the way. I need to take the bike in for a tune-up, though, because right now it's dirty as hell and there's a bunch of things that need to be replaced/tightened/fixed in order for it to be usable in the long run. That and I need to get a gel padded seat, because ow, my ass. On a bright note, I got an e-mail this morning with the billing for March, and it was really nice to confirm the amount that will be coming in in a couple of weeks. Since I'm working with G. these days, we split it 50-50, but it's still a lot of money. Like, almost twice as much as we made in February. April is going to be probably similar to February, but that's the downside of working freelance - you never know how much work you're going to get in a given month, and then you have to wait 45 days before getting paid. I was thinking of trying to find a job right away this summer, but with my mom coming to Poland in August and expecting me to spend time with her, and then the internship in Brussels in October, I'm wondering if maybe it wouldn't be better to stick to freelancing for now and then start looking in the fall. IDK, I have to think about that. There are some translation projects coming our way for the summer, so I think we'll be OK money-wise, but it'd be nice to have something regular and consistent to fall back on. And now, I'm going to go finish the work that's due today and then go to my phys-ed class. Maybe I'll even take my bike there instead of riding the tram across town. :D

So I've been fighting like, EXTREME dizziness/vertigo the last couple of days, and I'm starting to get really worried. Although it could be anything - symptom of migraine, symptom of depression, imbalance of something in my body, water in the ear, hell if I know. I have a referral to a neurologist, and if things aren't better by this afternoon (I woke up this morning with the beginnings of a pre-period migraine, the timing checks out, so maybe that's it) I may head to the hospital and see what they do with me. I don't really want to, because I have a crapload of translation to work on, but I guess I need to start taking care of myself. Plus, if I don't get better, G.'s going to drag me to the doctor himself.

On top of that the cat is sick (caught a cold or something and now he's got a weird meow and gross snot coming out of him - the vet game me something to boost his immune system and we'll see how he's doing next week), so we're not exactly having a good time.

Speaking of not having a good time, there is a shady e-book site scraping AO3 and Wattpad fics and selling them. You can go to ebooks-tree.com and search for your writing handle to see if you're in there. One of my fics was (it's not even an original fic!) so I already sent in a DMCA takedown notice - this post tells you how to do that on this site. Bleh.

And now I'm going to go back to bed for a bit more, because my migraine pill is kicking in and I'm feeling quite woozy on top of the very woozy I was already feeling.

Darlings on DW, a question - can anyone recommend a good source for layouts? I'm out of the CSS/layout making game these days, so I'd prefer something ready-made, but the places I used to look are kinda deserted these days, and I don't know where people go for them now.

I don't know if it's the changing season weather, or if it's the fact that it's shark week, or something else entirely, but these last few days have been bad ones for headaches. A week or so ago, I had the standard pre-period migraines, and this time it was four days of near constant pain that the sumatriptan didn't really do much for. It'd make it go away for a while, and then it'd start up again, so my backup of pills is kinda dwindled down right now. I need to remember to drop by the pharmacy tomorrow and see if maybe the additional box they were going to bring in for me is still there, or if I fucked up again and left it too long. *sigh* These last few days have been pretty nasty, headache-wise, too, which isn't helping in getting the translation that's due on Thursday. It'll get done, because we're more than half done and it's not too difficult (just really mind-numbingly tedious and repetitive), but it would be nice not to have it hanging over my head.

The meeting with the vice principal (or rather, deputy head of school to use the BrE parlance) went well yesterday, for all that it lasted about 5 or 6 minutes. We talked about what they expect me to do (basically, translating the promotional material for the school and the stuff for their website) and that was it, really. She talked about how the school is in renovations these days, so space is at a premium, and maybe I'd be willing to do the work remotely, which I'd be OK with, but I'm pretty sure that working on-site is actually part of the point of the internship, so the uni people in charge of it probably won't agree. Which doesn't really matter to me - as long as I have a place to sit down and an internet connection, I can work. I guess we'll see what the admin people say. This week is supposed to be for signing the contracts, so I'll find out soon.

My brain is so full of marketing mumbo-jumbo and corpo-speak that I can't think straight. But this job is going to pay quite a bit, so I guess I've got no choice by to sit here and chip away at it until it's done. Bleh. Also, why can't it be spring already? I'm ready for warmer weather and not having to bundle up when I sit in front of a computer. </whinge>

I woke up today with a migraine, took half a pill, felt it kick in (or rather, felt the side effects), but it wasn't until I realized I was trying not to cry from the pain that I figured I should probably take the second half. Spent the rest of the morning in bed with the drapes drawn and the cat locked out of my room so I could rest. Which means I'm still a little woozy and mostly feeling wiped, and in absolutely no shape to do any challenging work. Which means that the translation that's due tomorrow morning is going to require extra careful proofreading, because when I'm like this, I'm prone to making lots of stupid typos and errors.

The good thing about the translation work is that I'm getting more jobs these days, and I had an e-mail from one of the project managers stating that she'd like to "establish closer cooperation" with me. I'm not sure what this means exactly, but I'm hoping it'll translate (heh) into more work coming more regularly, which will give me a bit more financial stability.

I also got into the internship program, and I get 120 hours starting in March at a language school as a translator. I'm not holding my breath on the internship turning into a contract for full/part-time work, but maybe I can make some contacts that'll get me some additional freelance work. *fingers crossed*

Ugh. Being an adult is overrated.

Also, if someone could please tell me how to make my cat STFU and stop yowling, that'd be awesome. The pheromone collar doesn't seem to be working anymore, and he goes into the other room from where we are and sits there, crying for attention. But when we try to pet him/play with him, he acts like we're insulting him. #catsareassholes

So the university (or rather our department) is doing its damnedest to fuck us over by introducing a proposal to change the date we have to submit the final versions of our MA theses - from two weeks before the defense to TEN WEEKS. Which means that we might have to have them ready by just after Easter, or else have to defend in the fall. Apparently everyone at the department board meeting was against it, and the dean was the one who pushed for it, they're going to have him "think it over" and issue a final ruling that nobody will be able to appeal. And to make matters worse, nobody from the student council was at the meeting, which they're supposed to attend so they can, you know, look out for our interests.

Which is, of course, bullshit. And it not only affects us but also our thesis supervisors, who have to put together the exam commissions and find reviewers and everything else that much earlier. But, you know, who cares about that? There's some office monkey somewhere higher up in the hierarchy, possibly in the ministry of education, who incidentally has no idea what the fuck they're doing, who decided to show off by submitting a proposal like this, and now everyone's running with it. Without a moment's thought for the students. And now nobody knows what's happening, and everyone's in a panic, and don't even try to figure out how to plan the next six months of your life because fuck you, that's why.

I'm personally leaning towards deferring my defense till the fall anyway, because that'll give me a little more time to finish my thesis without having to, as our supervisor told us to do, cutting whatever's not needed and just getting it done. I may hate this university, I may hate my institute, I may hate my advisor, and I may hate the useless, unimaginative, lifeless husk that I call my thesis, but goddammit, I've made it this far, and I'd like for this thing to actually be something more than throwing up half-digested bits of other people's research and calling it a thesis. *siiiiigh*

We found all of this out on Tuesday, and I've been so fucking pissed off since then, I can't think straight. I have an essay to write for tomorrow, plus a cover letter and a resume to put together (also for tomorrow) so I can apply for the internship program they're offering this year. If I get into the program, it's 120 hours over two months, with the possibility of being offered a job with the company we intern with. Which means that I'll have less time to work on my thesis, which means I probably won't make the deadline, whether they move it or not. But the thing is, the internship is going to be a lot more useful to me in my professional life than a degree nobody cares about me having. So that's pretty much my decision made for me.

So I've had to make peace with data loss and give up on the idea of recovering the contents of the large external drive. :( Alas, I've gotten used to losing whatever data I put on an external sooner or later over the years, so it's not as hard a blow as it might have been. It was only movies and tv shows, so it's not like I can't replace them should I need them (assuming I can remember what they were...). A bigger annoyance is that I think I've lost some graphics files, probably due to the multiple moves of files back and forth and fucked up file sizes, but oh well.

Everything else is working now, although the graphics driver still seems to be a bit wonky and crashes randomly. It seems to be a known issue, not only with AMD drivers, so here's hoping we can get it figured out. I've got Steam running and a bunch of games queued to install, so hopefully the graphics issue won't interfere with that.

This week is finishing some assessments for school and putting in some more work on my MA thesis. I have to give a presentation on it tomorrow, but that should be easy. The fact that I get sick to my stomach every time I have to go see my thesis supervisor (I think I've figured out why we don't use the term "thesis advisor" - that implies actual helpfulness, rather than uselessly standing around and telling people how to do shit) pisses me off to no end. But oh well, one more semester, and it'll be over. There's an instructor at our institute who's basically come out right and said that if she had her habilitation (basically a higher doctorate, you can't be the advisor to a doctoral student without it), she'd invite me to stay on and keep going with my doctorate. I'm not really considering a doctorate right away (if at all), so by the time I decide to go for it, maybe she'll have her habilitation done. I brought up the idea of a PhD with my supervisor, and he was all "PhDs are for hobbyists, I wouldn't recommend it," which admittedly, did a lot to push me towards actually considering it. I'm not going to go into it without some financial security, so at least a year of work will be necessary before I make another 4 year commitment. I'm thinking of possibly doing a post-diploma course in literary translation next year, but I haven't decided on that yet.

My mother's in Poland this week, helping a friend of hers with some research in Warsaw and I think Krakow, and then she's coming to visit my grandparents for the weekend and staying for a few days. I'm hoping I can keep the amount of "omg you have to do a doctorate, you have SO MUCH POTENTIAL!" talk to a minimum, although I'm not holding my breath. My mother is very achievement-oriented, especially if they're my achievements that she can brag about. She's theoretically bringing me her old iPhone 5S (assuming she actually upgraded to the 6 like she said she would), which will come in handy, because my poor old 4 is slowly dying. It'll be nice having a slightly larger screen.

I hope she doesn't decide she wants to come visit me in Wrocław, because the apartment is a mess, there is a motorcycle in my room (and another one in G & B's room), and I really don't want to have to hear her "this place is shit, I can't believe you live here, it's so gross" lecturing again. We're moving at the end of the school year anyway, mostly because we want a slightly bigger place with a common space where we can work and have a TV and stuff) and also because the administration is horrible and full of useless twats who can't answer a simple question without making me want to strangle them. Ahem. So, yeah, here's hoping I can keep Mom away from here and just go straight to my grandparents'.

My Mac laptop is on the fritz - the monitor has the well-known dark streaks on the bottom, but this time it's not just a matter of putting the display to sleep and waking it up again, and since the laptop is over 6 years old, there's no point in fixing it. I may look at buying a monitor so I can just hook it up that way and have a desktop for now while I squirrel away the money to build a proper PC. I've been using my grandparents' PC laptop for now, mostly because I'm afraid to take it anywhere for fear the display with the cracked bezel and wonky lid will just crap out on me completely. This of course is not without its problems, such as finding a desktop mail client that doesn't make me want to vomit when I look at it, Windows keyboard shortcuts (although that's the least of the problems), and just generally getting used to everything looking different. Six years of a totally different look/function combo is hard to shake.

My mom's coming to Poland next week, spending a week in Warsaw on a research trip with a friend of hers, and then spending a week with my grandparents. She's (most likely) bringing me her iPhone 5 - they just upgraded to the 6, I think - which is good timing, because my iPhone 4 is starting to get wonky, too. The curse of me using electronics, I guess. I might also be getting an iPad mini, I guess as a Christmas present? IDK. It'll be nice to have a tablet again, if only so I have something to fuck around online during boring classes. >_>

A little while ago I bought an external power pack from Anker, which gives me a lot of extra juice to go on. I've been playing quite a bit of Ingress lately, which eats up battery power like whoa, so the powerbank lets me play without worrying about my phone (or mobile wi-fi router, since it can charge two devices at the same time) dying before I'm done. Even if you don't do anything as battery-intensive as Ingress, I highly recommend the Anker, if only for the peace of mind of having a backup power source. I've charged the phone 5-6 times almost to full before the power bank needed recharging, so there's that.

Here, have a cat picture:

Is there anyone reading this who knows Hebrew (or who knows someone who knows Hebrew) who could help me out with this? The three Hebrew fragments are names of God - the first one is, as best as I can decipher, "Eloah, El, Shaddai", and the third is Adonai (please tell me if I've got it right) but I can't figure out what the second one is supposed to be... The rest of the text is in Polish, which I don't need any help with. :D



The rough English translation of everything else is as follows:

Besides the prologue and the epilogue, the word "Everlasting" is not found anywhere in the book, but Job and his companions use the old Semitic words אלוהּ ,אל ,שדי (Eloah, El, Shaddai) “almighty” to indicate God. The word [second bit goes here] (Job 12:9) was most likely added – as old manuscripts confirm – as a result of a copier’s mistake, instead of אֲדֹנָי (Adonai) (cf. Job 28:28).