Hi, friends!
What sorts of things do you do to pass small time during your day? Like when you have 5-15 minutes, not a large time block.
Sometimes I use small time to do some fast decluttering or dishes, but more often I just chillax with some tiktoks or sudoku.
I’ll do the Wordle and Connections. I’m in a group chat with everyone in my BFF’s family (except for her) and we send our scores around to each other daily. BTW, her mom cheats.
cheating at wordle is…sad…to say the least LOL
i start with, “thing” and if there are no letters in the word i go with, “spare.”
every time “i” is the only letter and it isn’t in the middle, as in “thing,” it pisses me off! if there is an “i” in the middle and no other letters, i go with “spire.”
it is sacrificial at first but i find in using this strategy it is rare for me to not get it by 3 or 4.
i have all the time in the world for 8 hours/day so i obsessively read every article on somewhere between 50 and 100 political news sites. by 10am i am caught up on all of them so i curse at raw story, inside my head, every few minutes because it posts more frequently than all the others, “THERE IS NO POST YET????!!!!”
then i do raw word daily, wordle, and canuckle which kills 5 to 10 mins.
which is why i had all the time in the world for kinja and splinterrip and deadspinrip…but because i promised not to use my own servers i can’t ds.
perhaps i’ll make myself a user account so when i log in i am not logging into the server and see if the it guy notices?
I’ll go on my wife’s Facebook page to see what the family is doing. I don’t have my own Facebook because it is evil & I would piss off all my southern relatives if I ever posted or commented. It is useful for seeing who’s bday I forgot or feed my political posting sister ammunition on the side.
I just stay away even though I have an account. I rarely use it except to like pet pics or birthdays.
Deadsplinter?
Youtube.
When not pissed with pieces of plastic, building a kit.
Or inspire (not often enough these days) to write on whatever of three novels I’m working on.
Sometimes I feel like this Corgi.
If Ihave a few minutes I like to check the local subreddit for news. unfortunately it tends to be better than a lot of established sources these days, if more erratic.
I know I’ve mentioned in the past the little side hustle I’ve got going, if not necessarily the nature of it. But for about the past year, I’ve been getting alerts about these little projects sent to me, involving documents related to clinical trials that have been machine-translated — read: A. fucking I., yeah — from Spanish to English. If some other hungry bastard hasn’t already gotten to them before I do, then my job is to go over them to make sure that there aren’t any majorly egregious errors in the rendering, which is a task that’s known by the euphemism of “post-editing.”
Some of them are pretty good (particularly if I’ve already done work on them in the past) and may only need the prepositions changed or slight rephrasing in spots to make them sound more fluid in English. But once in a while, there’s some document that comes in with the streets, the last names or even fucking Buenos Aires translated into English — or one that’s been passed through a program that has its head shoved up its ass and renders every little goddamn thing literally, to the point where de hecho doesn’t show up as “in fact” but as “of made,” for fuck’s sake.
Anyway, I literally keep my laptop to the side and tinker with the stuff every so often while I’m taking calls, usually if there’s down time, I’m on an audio call where people can’t see what I’m doing or if the end of the work day is approaching like it is right now and I’m pretty much already over it. If it’s a good day, I can easily make up to an extra hundred bucks a day, if not more. And, yeah, I do make it a point to work on them while I’m already at work: Even beyond telling the Man to go fuck himself, I’d otherwise have to stay up several hours past my bedtime to finish them all. And I don’t need that kind of bullshit.
That’s super cool!
I’ve had a few projects at work where regulatory agencies provided Spanish “translations” for us and the company team that does translations have been like “yo these are shit.” I assume those are machine-translated given how bad the Spanish is. I haven’t taken Spanish classes since my early 20s and even I’ve seen some and been like WTLF at the translations!
Translating Buenos Aires into English is pretty wild. They may as well turn Washington DC into Washington Direct Current.
Well, it could just as easily be that the regulation agencies in question didn’t factor the translation into the budget, which meant that some middle-management fuckwit (a) passed the stuff through Google Translate – which technically counts, I guess, as machine-translation – and called it a day, (b) tasked some lowly intern who minored in Spanish with doing his (most likely, yeah, his) best or (c) found the cheapest outside agency he (ditto) could, without worrying about little things like quality control or whatnot.
The common denominator in all those scenarios, of course, is that this profession that I love can often be materially or financially undervalued by people who don’t know what exactly it entails and/or think that anybody can do it. And A.I., at least insofar as its encroachment into the knowledge work sector in general, is pretty much that kind of asshole mindset writ large.
I sit down at the piano.
Websites, particularly YouTube.