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Windows mail refuses to send a Word file as an attachment if the file is open. Where exactly this is a safety feature or enhancement, I know not. Too many lattes on the programmers' heads, I suppose.

The other day we called AT&T to ask a question about our bill. The person who answer the phone was a good sales person, and ended up selling us the Uverse package, that includes Internet, Cable TV (through phone lines) and phone service.

Except for a little installation mishap, the details of which I will spare you, I am happy with the service.

There is a little thing, though.

To strike the sale, the salesman said he would give us 6 months of free phone service.

Sure enough, when the bill came, the phone service charge was there, in all its splendor!

I am not really accusing ATT of anything. I am stating a fact. However, in my experience, this happens with just about anything you sign up for these days. Corporations always promise stuff they do not deliver. The sweetheart deals of the sales pitch readily become nightmares.

We called, and to be fair, they did not argue much - after all, the phone service was the least expensive component of the service...

The point is, how many thousands fall for the pitch, forget it, and end up paying more than they should?

Bottom line is, don't trust American corporations blindly. Not anymore.

A good bass player is often the glue that holds a band together. Witness of this fact are the Who's John Entwistle and Chris Squire. The latter manages to be Yes' glue, and at the same time, play solos. Quite an amazing feat.

Other bass players are known for exquisite lines and styles. One such player was Jaco Pastorius, who in addition to playing exceedingly well, also had a sound of his own, the Jaco growl. He prepared his bass guitar especially to make that sound, and I have never heard anybody else emulating it.

These are all very well known and discussed. There are a few others that deserve mention, but unfortunately, get drawn into the footnotes of rock or jazz history.

One such name is Graham Maby, who played for Joe Jackson for many years. He sounded great in any style, jazz, swing, new wave, hard rock. And he simply drove the band, whether a 3-piece rock band, or a swing orchestra.

Gary Thain, from Uriah Heep was also very good. His work on Sweet freedom is excellent. Gary ended up electrocuted on stage, and later died of a drug overdose - a trouble that claimed the lives of Jaco and Entwistle as well.

Trevor Bolder also played for Uriah Heep, but before that, he was David Bowie's sideman. He was also very solid.

Jim Lea, from Slade, was a very good instrumentalist and composer. His lines were imaginative and very driven.

Bruce Springsteen's Gary Tallent gets very little credit for the E Street band's sound.

Estou lendo o livro "As cinco tentações de um executivo", de Patrick Lencioni, traduzido para o português.

Notei logo de cara um erro tão básico de tradução, que me fez chorar de rir, rir de chorar, ou coisa deste tipo.

O termo "Business School" foi traduzido como "escola de comércio", nâo uma, mas diversas vezes.

Considerando que as traduções são revisadas e os livros, editados, chega-se à conclusão que nem o tradutor, nem o revisor (ou editor) sabem muito sobre o mundo dos negócios, para chamar "Business School" de "escola de comércio".

A pergunta que paira no ar é, quantos outros erros de interpretação, não tão óbvios, e mais importantes, aparecem na tradução.

Se isto fosse um caso isolado, vá lá. Mas o fato é que em quase todos livros traduzidos do inglês para o português encontro erros crassos de interpretação e tradução.

Vamo que vamo.

On the first of January, my wife had a kidney stone. She is uninsured.

We went to a hospital that shall remain nameless, for my point is not complaining about the hospital. A nurse friend told me the place is always empty, and the care is good, because it is just an Emergency Unit, rather than a full blown hospital. I followed his advice.

Sure enough, the long lines were nowhere to be found, and my wife was seen and treated right away. She had to take a catscan, was given a power pain killer injection and received a prescription.

Then comes the billing person. The first question is - do you have insurance, answer no. Then the games start. She asked me how much I could pay a month. Imagining the bill would be enormous, I said 500 bucks. Then she asked how much I would pay that night. I said 500. Then she offered me the deal of the century. For US$1,050.00, I would settle the whole thing, and never get another bill from them.

I went for it.

A few days later, I get a letter from the hospital, showing how much insurance would have paid for the care. US$7,200.00!! Yes, a whopping $6,150.00 difference.

I suppose they sent me the letter so I would be very appreciative of the break they gave me.

Honestly, I see it differently. I do not think the hospital made no money on the US$1,050.00 I paid them. They made more then enough, and would not offer it to me had they not made money. Trouble is, they want to make a huge amount of money, so they overcharge insurance companies. This makes insurance costly for everybody.

Adding insult to injury, a month later I did get a bill from a radiology company in Massachusetts (we are in Florida), for almost 300 bucks.

This, my friends, is the problem with the healthcare system. Greed and lies.

Fake British accents on American songs...Urgh!

When a dream turns into a nightmare, the best thing to do is wake up.

Sure, I know that for banks anybody with less than 1 million dollars in the account is just a number.

The only thing is that as such institutions are largely run by bean counters, whose main calling in life is reducing costs at all costs, pardon the pun, and given that the age of information allows certain things, I found the bubbly correspondence I got in the mail today to be hilarious.

I will not bore you with the gory details of a conversation I had with the institution, that claimed my APR would not be increased, because of an honest mishap. The fact is, it was raised in spite of the promise.

What astounds me is that the bank is offering me to transfer balances and get "financial flexibility to manage all my expenses" at the swell rate of 30.24%!!!

Gee, I find it almost impossible to transfer debt from a higher APR than this!

It would not take a computer wizard to plan this campaign to people who had not yet been punished by the Bank. This would certainly save the bank quite a few thousand dollars in mailing, printing and administrative expenses. But no sir. No bean counter thought of that.

So here it is, for your amusement, part of the hilarious correspondence I got.

Optimism and faith are not the same thing. Optimism is an emotional response , faith a spiritual one. Two very different things.

That is why so many people suffer today. They mix their optimism and ensuing expectations with faith, and worse still, too many people believe they can speak their desires into reality...Which would make it all rational.

Some of the software that is supposed to aid translator productivity is laughable - for instance, survey translation tools.

Where exactly that improves translator productivity, I know not.

The reality is, it might serve the client well, giving a ready product, and paying one individual for the job of two.

I find that a lot of technology does affect quality in a bad way, in translation and other types of work.

In the translation field we spend so much effort, these days, making sure formatting is not affected, software procedures are followed, etc etc, that the actual translation quality suffers.

No doubt, part of the problem stems from the fact that software designers and developers are mostly engineers, think like engineers, and treat language as a mathematical science. Thus, a lot of the functionality that is built into software does not take into consideration synthax and grammatical differences, style considerations and a host of other things.

No wonder good writing if quickly becoming a lost art...

Acho que a Folha Online exagerou (e continua exagerando) na cobertura da morte do cartunista Glauco.

Toda morte de um ser humano é trágica, principalmente quando se trata de um assassinato, só que a folha está extrapolando na importância que está dando ao caso.

Esta certo que se tratava de um colega, de uma certa expressão na sua área, mas longe de ser uma pessoa tão importante assim.

Num rompante de delírio, o jornal, sempre avesso na cobertura de religiões, chegou a colocar um link para os hinos religiosos compostos pelo cartunista - ex adepto e sacerdote do Santo Daime.

O detalhe mais curioso é que a religião inclui nos seus cultos a ingestão de uma substância halucinógena, e o suposto assassino. que chegou a frequentar os cultos da tal religião pareceu "transtornado", segundo a polícia. Pessoas que têm por hábito tomar halucinógenos normalmente ficam transtornadas.

O jornal, tão rápido para apontar defeitos em certas religiões (principalmente evangélica, cuja cobertura é sempre cheia de adjetivos e tendenciosa) pouco ou nada falou sobre o "chá" tão usado nos cultos do Daime.

Assim como não identificou, até hoje, a religião da casa de ritos religiosos da pessoa que inseriu diversas agulhas numa criança na Bahia...

The fact that Kumho or Hankook might be the F1 tire manufacturer starting next year is to me a bit troublesome.

I am not 100% sure these companies are up to the task.

Why exactly would Jimi Hendrix be trendy, today, according to Yahoo, I do not know.

The man has been dead for a long time, and his music does sound dated.

It seems that almost everything you read in major media, today, is plotted there in exchange for a few bucks, I suppose.

So much for the information super highway. Call it disinformation.

...and got so very thin?

American news magazines, such as Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report.

They are so thin now, they look like brochures.

And the quality of advertisers is questionable.

The media world is indeed upside down.

I am either one very difficult customer, or the world is going crazy.

Why is it the vast majority of upgrades or updates made to software, sites etc, generally make things more difficult, rather than easy? Functionalities are not improved, and to make matters worse, useful functionalities are either hidden or renamed.

Given nothing comes with a manual anymore, and online manuals are basically a waste of time, we are basically left to wonder.

I will not even start with customer service requests that are never answered.

I guess this is what they are teaching in MBA schools.

They say that sharks can't stop swimming, they die. Maybe that is why they are so cranky.

I have no idea whether this is true. There are so many urban legends, it is not funny. For instance, the whole thing about duck quacks not producing an echo has been proved wrong, yet, you see this statement all over the place.

So I have not checked about the shark thing.

The Internet is a bit like the shark thing. If you stop, you die into irrelevance. So, you can't have static sites. The powers that be, the algorithms that rule the world do not like that. You might be in page one today, page 1,256,789th tomorrow if you don't keep adding stuff.

So add, even if you don't have anything to say.

Or be poised to suffer an inglorious death.