An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

I received the following album link from a friend: the photos consist of pages from a Hangul - English phrasebook. Commented samples from the publication "Living Englise Language Everyday" Aside from the implicit perceptions of "common" phrases that the authors seem to expect to be spoken or heard in English, the most noticeable grammatical mistakes seemed to arise from the unpredictable use of "to be" in place of "to have". This was actually something I noticed when studying French and German, such as the "j'ai froid" "I am cold" "mir ist kalt" comparisons (and it's "j'ai faim" "I'm hungry" "ich habe Hunger"/"ich bin hungrig") - in Japanese at least, the subject is so often omitted that just saying "寒い" ("[I feel] cold") and "お腹がすいた" ("[My] stomach has become empty", to attempt a literal interpretation). This would ex

Several of my fondest childhood memories stem from working in libraries. There, it was often my duty to take a crisp newspaper and clamp it to a wooden holder for broadsheets. My preferred paper was The Globe and Mail from quite early on; one of the alumni from my high school is a prominent columnist  there. The advent of the internet in the early to mid-90s happened to coincide with a period that I didn't subscribe to broadsheets and lived without TV (otherwise known as my time at university). To procrastinate from studies, I often read through some of the newsgroups, and played around with a personal set of HTML pages. Interestingly I was still working in the libraries during this period, but had moved to cataloguing new arrivals of periodicals, and didn't touch newspapers except for the occasional copy of the university papers ( The Tech  and  Tech Talk - I was saddened to learn the latter went out of print in 2009) or  Bay Windows , made freely available to the communit

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! ;)