My unintentional (and BADLY timed) vacation from the SDMB: a semi-rant.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So here’s the deal:

TTT and I have finally finished the project that we were working on (every frigging day for the past 2 months! Damn! I never worked that hard in my life!!), and we decide to just take a week off and chill…

Great! I need some time off, if for no other reason than to catch up on my personal hygiene stuff… I was sick of donning an oxygen mask just to scale the pile of dirty laundry mildewing between my door and my bed…

Also, I have spent far too little time on the SDMB in the last few weeks! This has had physical effects… more on that later!

So, TTT and I take a few days off… I’m loving it! I’m sleeping until noon or later, getting up and dressing for the sole purpose of making a beer run, and spending the day playing games and waiting for Astrogirl to get off work. This is GREAT!

One problem: for some unknown reason, most of the time I can’t access the SDMB!!!:frowning:

Something is wrong with the university LAN! DAMN!

Other sites come through OK… CNN, Fortean Times, porn sites (Ahem… so I imagine, anyhow…:D), but no SDMB, save for a few clear moments where I was able to make a sporadic post or two…

During dinner last night, Astrogirl noticed that something was wrong. “Why your face move like that? What wrong with your hand???” (Translation: ‘What’s the deal with your facial tick? Why are your hands shaking???’) I managed to assuage her fears, and finish dinner with only the bare minimum of chopstick spillage due to shakey hands…

Suddenly tonight, Astrogirl having gone home, I seem to be able to access the SDMB! HUZZAH!!!:slight_smile:

Will I be able to post this? Will I be able to access the SDMB tomorrow? Next week? 5 minutes from now, for that matter? Who knows…

Anyways, I’m still here!

Arrgh! DEATH to incompetant LAN admins.!!! (No offense to any LAN admins. here…)

2

Well you’re coming through loud and clear as usual. Glad you’re back, and glad to hear the project is finished.

Bet you don’t want to see another idiom for a looooooooooooong time. :wink:

3

Poor baby. I’m glad you’re back. I’ve missed stalking you.
:wink:

4

Thanks Screech and Ginger…

But I’m back provisionally! Just now I’m having major troubles getting on to the boards!

Damn this LAN anyways!!:mad:

5

You may want to email the Admins–the code red worm thingy a couple of weeks ago made my firm blanket ban a bunch of foreign ISPs–we had to get a couple of legit ones unblocked specially. Hope you can get back to reg status.

6

Have you tried accessing the boards using the IP address directly? 65.201.198.9

7

Astroboy14 have you mentioned what this project is on the boards somewhere (link?)? I’ve been hearing about it for months and every time you mention it I wonder what you are doing?

Is it top secret? Will you have to kill me after telling me? Will we ever learn what the fruits of your labor hath wrought upon the world?

8

Sorry Fredge… I didn’t mean to be too mysterious, but we had been keeping it fairly quiet until it was finished because we didn’t want any of the big publishers here to beat us to it (OK, we’re paranoid!:slight_smile: ).

So the Project:

TTT and I spent the past year writing an idioms dictionary for Korean students of English. We tried our hardest to cover every idiom used in common conversational American English (and even after sending everything to the publisher, I’m still coming up with idioms that I don’t think we covered… Second edition!)… wrote example sentences to illustrate the meaning, cross-referenced, translated the whole shebang into Korean, etc. Whew! A LOT of work (especially the key word index!! MAN!)… but hopefully we’ll make some money from it.

I did start a thread about writing a dictionary about a year ago or so when TTT and I were first kicking around the idea… but by the time the thread had petered out, we had decided that doing so was going to be far more work than we were up for. A week or so later, however, we decided to just do it. After all, we reasoned, we had the time and the resources… we were thinking we could finish it in about 4 or 5 months, but as it turned out it took almost a year!

9

Wow Astroboy. Kudos for taking on such a huge project and working so hard at it. I hope you get the LAN problem sorted out soon. Like Humble Servant said - check that it’s not anything to do with your ISP. Hurry back soon.

10

That’s cool Astroboy14. Congratulations on the completion of your project. Now is the time for many beers and other drinks of your choice. Have one for me!

11

I definately want to buy a copy of that when you get it published. My wife of 12 1/2 years, who actually speaks pretty good english, wouldn’t know an idiom if you smacked her in the head with it. :slight_smile:

12

Thanks, guys!:slight_smile:

Hell, Fugazi, e-mail me your address and I’ll send you a copy when it is published (should be early October)… but the Korean translation won’t help your wife unless she’s Korean! :smiley: At the moment, we are planning to publish only in Korea…

As for the LAN problems, they seem to have been worked out, as I seem to be able to access the boards now… my guess is that the LAN admins. were working on the LAN for the past few weeks before the new semester started…

Anyone heard from MR.O lately? He’s on the same LAN as me… I wonder if he’s been able to get on…

13

By the way… how does one do this??

I’m clueless…

14

astroboy, good to have you back. Missed those riviting posts, especially when Astrogirl was in Guam or where-ever. I seem to remember something about your urine stream, but I digress.

Don’t know if you get Channel V in Korea. There is a great show called Go West by an American Chinese named David Wu. It’s an idiom show translating american slang into Chinese. Pretty dang funny, but probably funnier if you understand Chinese as well. anyway, you’d probably appreciate it.

15

Open IE or Netscape or whatever you use and in the address bar where you normally type http://boards.straightdope.com type http://65.201.198.9 instead.

When you type the name (board.straightdope.com) your request goes to a DNS server (Domain Name Server) that converts the text address to the IP address (the numbers). All you’re doing in this case is giving it a specific address instead of relying on the translation.

16

Astro, (I always want to say it like the Jetson’s dog: Rastro!) what an amazing project!

Have you considered the idea of selling off the list of idioms to other interpreters who want to do a list for other languages? I mean, you’ve done all the work for them, you could sell off your collection as a finished product. Would give them a base to start from and make you some extra cash!

17

We have, in fact, considered this… but translating into Japanese/Chinese/ etc. is beyond us… and our publisher would get 50% of the royalties (which seems somewhat unfair to us…) so that’s a topic that is currently being debated…

And China, nope, don’t get that channel… however if we get our dictionary translated into Chinese, I expect you to push it to all your Chinese friends!:wink:

18

astroboy, that is fantastic. sure to be a best seller. i recently bought an idiom dictionary for a friend, just english and english, but a great help to her. she would get this “well, why didn’t you just say that” look on her face when we would use an idiom and then have to explain it. although she taught me some new idioms when she would just directly translate from russian. as miss scarlett would say, “tomorrow, again day.”

19

AHA! “Same sh**, different day!” We have that!

We tried to cover EVERYTHING that is current, common, idiom-speak… but I’m sure we missed some really obvious ones…