In case you missed the first installment, Eve Bodeux and Corinne McKay have just now posted their second podcast, a review of the ATA conference in Orlando. The website is Speaking of Translation, and the conference podcast is available either as one long 40-minute segment or chunked according to subjects.

I’m a few miles short of being a 1K member on United Airlines – and I’m not flying on any company’s dime. So I have seen my share of service or lack thereof. That’s why I’m intrigued by the following news item in the Chicago Tribune:

A husband and wife are suing United Airlines for “negligently” overserving alcohol during a flight from Osaka, Japan, to San Francisco, saying the carrier’s drinks fueled the domestic violence involving the two shortly after their plane landed.

As Mark Ashley said in in Upgrade: Travel Better: “Whom do I have to threaten to sue to get that kind of service on UA?” Anyone? I think those of you flying US airlines can appreciate the irony.

I just photoshopped this years holiday card. Since I am believer in dead-tree media when in comes to important announcements, congratulatory messages, and holiday wishes, I use an on-line service to mail cards to clients and colleagues I have worked with during the course of the year. This service lets me create my own cards, use different fonts (even handwritten characters that are scanned in), and signatures. The cards are then mailed with a regular postage stamp on the envelope. I am certain that they get more attention than e-mail greetings or e-cards and that they feel more personal. There are a number of services like that out there. I have been using SendOutCards for a number of years with good results.

This year’s holiday card is to remind people that I don’t live in ice and snow anymore. What better symbol than a palm tree, I thought. I hope, just like Margaret Marks, that Happy Holidays “doesn’t infuriate too many.”

At last month’s ATA conference in Orlando, many attending translators were wandering the exhibition hall checking out translation memory software in the hope of finding the product to replace Trados. The promise of translation memory interchangeability seemed to make this quest almost possible.

Naomi de Moraes has a post on the website of the ATA Language Technology Division about Wordfast. Most interesting is a user report, referenced in the comments to Naomi’s post, cautioning about claims of memory compatibility. Anybody thinking about switching from Trados to another tool and not telling their clients since the memories are supposedly compatible should read this report.

The Time Warner outage of the last two nights was caused by failure of their domain name server and affected over a million customers in the area. Just goes to show how important domain name service is. While living in Missouri, I had DSL service from our local telephone company. Their DNS service was notoriously flaky – long delays in resolving addresses, not finding addresses, several requests before an address was resolved, etc. etc. It affected not only Web surfing but e-mail service as well.

Luckily, I found an alternative which helped me through my DSL years in Missouri: OpenDNS. They offer DNS services for free, all you have to do is enter their IP addresses in your Network Connections or in the set-up page of your router. Takes only a couple of minutes, and you have quick, uncensored, unbiased DNS service. Want another opinion? Click here.

… well, now that I live in Southern California, I have been waiting for an opportunity to use this in a headline (http://snurl.com/7qt6d). Yesterday, my Internet access died. As usual, Time Warner told me that it wasn’t their fault – something must be wrong with my computer. But seriously: For several hours no web addresses were resolved, and as it turned out, TW’s domain name servers were down.

This morning, everything was working again, but then at around 4:30pm the same thing happened – failure to resolve. By 7pm it still was not back up. Just about 30 minutes ago I reset my modem and router and now it seems to work again.

During the cable outage I still had Internet access through my cell phone network, so it’s not a matter of Internet withdrawal; I suffered from broadband withdrawal.

Few translators would dispute, I think, that confidentiality is an important prerequisite for our business. Clients hand us documents with all sorts of information, and they have a reasonable expectation that those details will not go beyond our desk. When working for agencies, those agencies have a reasonable expectation that we will not go behind their backs and offer our services directly to the clients that they have developed and nurtured. I am saying this to explain that I have no problems signing non-disclosure or non-compete agreements – as long as they deal with confidentiality and competition, and deal with them in a common-sense fashion.
more…

This morning my stats program logged a surprisingly specific, albeit totally not translation-related Google search: is a subsidy pin phone specific or sim specific? But wait, back in 2006 I had a post about SIM subsidy locking and Sim locks, and that’s probably why the Google search led to this blog. The 2006 question about a German translation for SIM subsidy lock (which is not the locking/unlocking of a SIM chip via PIN) remains unanswered.

This funny (in an absurd way) video turns out to be actually a lengthy promotion for Australia’s SBS, “the world’s most linguistically diverse broadcaster.”

Birds of a Feather Twitter Together – great write-up in the Wall Street Journal. All the basics about Twitter.