An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Since childhood, I've found that if I devote a certain amount of concentrated effort thinking in one language, there is a transitory period where trying to speak another language is frustratingly difficult. The worst experience I had of this was a few years ago. After a few weeks of only working, reading and dreaming in English, I bumped into a Japanese faculty member at DCU. I sincerely hope she doesn't remember the incident, as it was painfully humiliating for me: practically no Japanese issued from me at the time, but stubborn pride kept me from switching to English. The fact it was a chance encounter definitely exacerbated the situation, but I was no stranger to this phenomenon. When I entered the Canadian school system, I'd had practically no prior exposure to English. This meant that for a few years initially, I'd answer questions posed to me at school in Japanese, and at home it would take about an hour before I'd revert to Japanese with my parents. Saturd

I once had a brief conversation with a colleague, after I'd co-founded a "Council for Writing Quality" at a previous workplace. He'd scoffed at my efforts, and I can still remember (and recreate) a steep rise in my blood pressure when he said "But, others can understand [the message] anyway. Who cares if there's the occasional typo?" It probably behooves me to insert a disclaimer concerning both people with dyslexia or other linguistic learning disorders and non-native speakers at this point, prior to commencing my rant in earnest. I certainly wouldn't exact the same standards for either writing or pronunciation when I'm aware that they're functionally blind, cognitively impaired, or if the language happens to be someone's second, third or fourth tongue. But the above paraphrase originated from someone who was not suffering from any known linguistic impairment and only knew English natively. Perhaps it's because English was not m

I feel fortunate that I can't identify first-hand with Tina, the long-suffering tech writer in Dilbert. My desire to provide user and administrator manuals for software applications stem back to even before I entered the professional workforce. The motivations, however, didn't stem from any false hopes that there would be any significant audience for said work. As an undergraduate I eventually ended up majoring in a combination of Technical Communication and what they call Brain & Cognitive Science, which involved neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. I also worked at the university libraries, where I spent one summer cataloguing musical recordings by the various ensembles over several decades (mainly on vinyl). It was the following year, that their adoption of a system from OCLC (I believe it was Connexion, but I could be mistaken) led to an opportunity to create an administrators' concise guide. When later I arrived at a documentation role, I found that str

It occurred to me that next year marks twenty years since I first began to use email. Since then I've registered and deactivated well over a dozen addresses. Now I have ten active ones, most of which filter and forward mails into two inboxes: one business, and one personal. If I become more adept at tapping - or Swyping - perhaps I'd want to use my smart phone for most personal communiqués. However, I think it will take considerable time before becoming comfortable using "text message orthography" in business contexts, including instant messaging. This is why I'm not even going to address the basics of formal writing rules such as capitalization, punctuation, and writing out words fully, in the following tips. Use the subject line effectively: differentiate and justify why you're sending the email by summarizing its primary topic clearly. I'd also recommend attempting to be concise at the same time, but it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to d

It should be unsurprising to my readers, that this blog itself has been an experiment in SEO. From its inception (e.g. which service I selected to host it), to its traffic analysis, thus far I've learned a bit and questioned much. For interests' sake, the all-time visitor breakdown by country (which could be skewed by anyone spoofing their IP, of course) is the following: United States         250 Canada                   92 Austria                    74 France                    74 Australia                 45 Japan                      18 Germany                 13 United Kingdom        9 Russia                       8 India                         5 Some counts make perfect sense: I can trace back the majority of Austrian and Australian visits to people whom I know. In the US, I can thank Mick for being such a faithful reader and commenter, although not all the American traffic is likely to be solely attributable to him