TransRio en Ingles

Back in May I described a great method for language learning based on finding super-interesting articles, then reading them in combination with the text-to-speech and mini-translator functionality in Word (New Toy, May 2011). I now use this technique every morning, usually for 10 to 30 minutes. It’s by far and away the best thing I’ve ever found for an easy, everyday language warm-up. Since writing the original article, it has smoothed out for me into something I look forward to, and a good little habit.

Here are the actual steps I go through now – (more…)

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A year ago I wrote an article about traveling light without a computer, even in a business setting, by using a cloud drive along with public computers instead. I had just returned from Argentina, and the method worked great. This year I was packing for the same trip again, and planning on doing the exact same thing. The technique involves a small amount of printing to paper. In the original article I said this:

"Every trip is different. When packing data, I think about the trip, I think about the things I’ll need, I think in terms of a toolkit at my disposal which includes 1. Paper, 2. Computer, 3. Mobile devices, and 4. Thumb Drive. (Paper, by the way, should never be underestimated. Instant-on, infinite battery life, and who cares if it’s stolen. So thin-and-light that it vanishes when viewed on-edge. There’s a reason it’s popular.) To this list I can now add #5: Cloud drive."

So there I was, packing for the same trip a year later, and thinking as usual of the few things it would be nice to have printed ahead for paper reference. (more…)

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Man, talk about unpleasant and inconvenient…

Four days ago I clicked my own homepage, and saw my antivirus go bananas. Looking at my own source code I saw a strange little script that had no business being there. At first (being extremely naïve way back then, four days ago) I thought, hmm, that’s weird.

I finally got the mess cleaned up. It’s Sunday night, and it took me 20 hours of hard work. I’m leaving for Argentina in a week, so I really needed to be able to point people to my blog. I couldn’t afford to just take it down. (more…)

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Awhile back Natalia pushed me out of the nest, saying it was finally time for me to start writing to her in Spanish. For years we have been writing back and forth bilingually, my e-mails in English, hers in Spanish. Which was super pleasant. But it was laziness on my part, and in fact unbecoming of a person whose goal is to do business in Latin America.

Writing in Spanish was hard for me at first but it’s getting easier with practice. I read well, but speak poorly, and I had zero experience with writing. To my surprise though, just having everyday language tools readily at hand makes it much, much easier now than it would have been, say, 5 years ago. It isn’t cheating to use these things. In fact writing simple e-mails with the support of spell-checkers and grammar-checkers, conjugators and dictionaries, and of course machine translation, is just a great way to get continual correcting feedback while learning any language.

Over the years I’ve written several posts about language learning and language tools, so today I decided to make a new category called Language — it’s apparently a theme on this blog. If you click Language on the sidebar, you’ll see some of these prior posts. Always they have a special focus on free or nearly-free computer applications. I just finished sending an e-mail to Natalia and I thought it might be worth describing the tools I like best for anybody else who’s struggling with a second language. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language,Recommendations
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When I was a tyke they gave us map-reading aptitude tests. I loved those tests. Ever since, I’ve tried to stay one jump ahead of the rest of the class. Now I’m an old guy. Anybody who knows me knows I get stuck in a good map, like anybody else might get stuck in a good book. In fact, on trips, I no longer bring a book to read. It can be a camping trip, a foreign trip, no matter where I go I know I’ll just be reading maps. It’s relaxing for me. Sometimes after staring at a good map for a really long time, suddenly there it is: the perfect route, the perfect camping spot. Or in a city, something fun beyond the bridge, that I would have totally missed.

On any trip, I’d rather have the perfect map than the perfect guidebook — or even the perfect guide. It’s fun having that freedom to just explore on your own. Maps let you do that. It’s not uncommon to know things even most locals don’t know, based on serious perusal of a good map. Come to think of it, in our house, we even decorate with maps. The maps get the premium wallspace. They are our art.

This article is about how I’m doing topos now. So it’s about topos specifically. Much of what I say though is equally applicable to city maps or road maps, like you’d use on other kinds of trips. (more…)

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This month’s Inc. magazine printed a harsh but well-written feature story about Argentina. The author is Max Chafkin, a writer I like. Lately he’s been specializing in going to countries with extreme business climates, interviewing people, then writing a good article full of direct quotes from locals. In February he did Norway, a country which measures surprisingly healthy for business in spite of being highly socialized. Argentina is at the other end of the spectrum, historically and currently a rough environment for business. I found it really interesting to read stories about how people adapt. It’s a good article which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the subject — the Norway article is especially good, too.

I’m hoping Mr. Chafkin keeps going with this idea. I vote he goes next to India, Egypt, or Peru.

PS — If you found these articles interesting, here are more links you might like:

• Doing Business – World Bank Group
• Human Development Reports, UNDP
• And also, here’s a page from my FAQ I wrote a few years ago, titled Why Argentina

Filed by Pete under Business,Recommendations
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Recently a good friend called me and asked my recommendation for the best way to learn Spanish. This post is not about language learning generally, it’s about one single, wonderful toy I recently discovered, which I’m using every day now in my own language practice. But first, as background, I would like to talk more generally about learning languages, from a bird’s eye view.

If you want to skip over the "Tricks" section right below, feel free. The new technique I found is at the end, under "Toy." (more…)

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If you love your gadgets — and I think we all love, and hate, our gadgets — you may recognize that feeling of bliss, so rare, when all of your gadgets are working. I had one of those moments, oddly enough, passing through security and customs back into the United States. I set my shoes in the tray, pushed my roll-aboard and daypack onto the belt, and… they stopped me. "Sir, do you have a computer?" No… "A cell phone?" No…

Just in that moment, I felt that little wave of bliss. A successful three-week trip, partly business, and all of my gadgets were working — in fact even better, I had no gadgets, to NOT work.

On the cell phone, I cheated — Natalia gave me one to use while in Córdoba. On the computer, though, I was trying something new, and I have to say the reviews are in. I have proof-of-concept now, and it’s great.

Some background. On any trip, of any length, no matter who you are, (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
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It’s probably safe to say that we all love Google. A basic Google search is so effective and so danged useful that we mostly overlook the things Google DOESN’T do. Google gets blocked by anything that isn’t clean HTML or PDF. It can’t fill in a form to query a database. It can’t go past anything requiring a fee, a subscription, or a password. The part of the web that Google can’t reach is called the Deep Web, and it happens to be non-trivial. Best estimates put it around 500 times larger than the Surface Web, in terabytes. But that’s not what actually matters. What’s important is that much of the highest-quality content is housed there. There’s good stuff underneath the Surface Web, that we wish we could get at.

Every search is different, but depending on what we’re after, it’s always easy to recognize high-quality hits as opposed to low-quality hits. For example the last serious search I did (several hours) was learning about cloud backup and storage. Specifically I was shopping for an online backup provider which would also work well for retrieving encrypted & passworded documents using any Web-enabled device while traveling. This is a new hot area, with a lot of buzz, a lot of new startups, lots of flavors available, a ton of competition. Hard, in other words, to cut through the fog. In this case, a high-quality hit would be (more…)

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More than a year ago I posted a lengthy article on machine translation, reporting the state of things back then, and testing six leading MT products ("MT playoffs, March 2009"). The results had Google in first place, with Language Weaver next, and Microsoft third. I closed the article with this: "Bear in mind this was a single test of 500 words, and just English-Spanish. But things are changing so fast a person really should do their own tests anyway once a year…"

Testing is actually hard work, not as easy as you would think. You really should do it, though, if you routinely use these tools. Get a chunk of sample text, run it through the various MT options out there, and compare the output. Seems quick and easy. The hard part, though, is that the output (in my case) is Spanish, and while I read it OK, it’s slow going for me really judging quality. Added to that, first impressions of MT quality can really be deceiving. A butchered first sentence makes a whole paragraph look like crap, and it’s only after digging into it that you might notice what’s good about it.

Well, I did the work, as well as some other research having to do with translation in general, and I’m feeling really good now. All caught up on things. In a nutshell, here’s what I found:

I tested seven MT providers, including all the current leaders. Overall I was very impressed by the quality I was seeing; links to their translation pages are provided at the end of this article, if you want to see what I mean. The biggest surprise by far was that, over the past 16 months, Microsoft must have been grinding away pretty hard in the back room, because they’ve quietly closed the gap with Google. In my opinion they can claim the number one slot now, at least for Spanish. I totally wasn’t expecting that. In fact, I had to stare at it from several directions before I could actually believe it. (more…)

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