An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

I recently communicated with a newly hired colleague, who had just completed his Master's degree. After inviting me to contact him primarily by email or instant message, he remarked upon how he found teleconferences "old school". His comment gave me pause to think about my experience with globally distributed teamwork. While in my prior role at the software research lab, our team was distributed across CDT (UTC - 5 hours) through GMT and all the way to JST (UTC + 9 hours). Email was definitely the main form of having complex discussions, and as the centrally located team, we primarily conversed via instant messaging (where accents and bad audio quality couldn't interfere with comprehension) with the Japanese, UK and Egyptian colleagues in our mornings, and the American and Canadian ones in our mid afternoons. There were regular teleconferences (from which the Japanese were mostly exempt due to them being late in their nighttime typically), but those tended t

Now that my blog has been extant for two months, I thought I'd compare more of the traffic statistics I can glean. Blogger itself provides some basic information (their penchant for only displaying the top 10 entries is starting to bother me), so I've taken a look at the all time breakdown of my visitors' browser choices: Pageviews by Browsers Firefox 480 (49%) Internet Explorer 170 (17%) Safari 155 (15%) Chrome 97 (9%) Mobile 49 (5%) Mobile Safari 19 (1%) Opera 2 (<1%) SimplePie 2 (<1%) Overall, this is what Searchengineland says are the latest stats for browser use courtesy of Chitika, who studied North American usage. IE is (still) just holding the majority of all users: And also from the same article , people who read Searchengineland use these browsers (I'm thinking these numbers represent their global audience, though it wasn't clearly spec

I was distressed to read in Searchengineland that Bing is testing something similar to Google's SERP structure, where organic result lists are interrupted by paid entries, or compilations of "emphasized" content, often at the "fold" position (4th or 5th place, roughly halfway down the page). Distressed, yes, but not surprised - time will tell whether their trial run reveals that users pay attention to the faint labeling that indicates that a listing is an advertisement, but it seems well established already that the Google practice of placing sponsored links at the very top and to the right hand column in SERPs has led to its users learning to largely ignore the right hand area of the page , along with spending less viewing time on the very top of the main body as well. The presence of "search engine provider-preferred" content at the fold position, also means that listings that fall beneath this visual area are only likely to be noticed by visitor

I wonder how often product names are vetted by native speakers of languages when considering marketing something in that region. And if they are, how often slang and rhyming words of dubious character are taken into consideration.  Certainly, when my employer purchased an electric hatchback car earlier this year (as a corporate vehicle that can be reserved for client visits and such), I was bewildered by the wave of snickering that accompanied the announcement of its name, and the ever so slightly aggrieved way the speaker delivered the news. It turns out that the acronym by which it's called closely approximates an Austrian slang word for "stench". In looking at National German, I see there's also another (less similar sounding)  slang term , about which I was not told. Product namers, beware!

I was recently re-watching the first season of Frasier , when I was reminded of the misuse of the term "literally". As it turns out, a kindred spirit has conveniently supplied a transcript (and embedded the video excerpt).  As for my post title, yes: I have something like this, upon which I sit part of the time as I work from my home office: Metaphorically, however, I would like to think I am almost always on the ball professionally! ;)

It's actually interesting to note that for much of the 20th century, many Japanese organizations like schools and some workplaces did participate in radio calisthenics . Even my Saturday morning language schools had them at the start of each school session. In any case, a recent meeting with a UK entrepreneur reminded me of another benefit to living on the European continent: my first name is almost never mispronounced any longer. If you wish to impress your Japanese colleagues or clients, I strongly recommend that you remember the following simple rules: There are only 5 pure vowels in Japanese, which are identical to the Italian vowels: from the way I pronounce (Canadian) English, the sounds are: A as in altruism, E as in elbow, I as in index, O as in olfactory and U as in ulna. The letter y can be seen preceding three of the vowels (ya や, yu ゆ, yo よ); it's always used as the consonant. Note: having received linking permission, here is  an audio file from a friend

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