TransRio en Ingles

I don’t like to go too long between posts, but unfortunately there hasn’t been much worth posting. I’ve been busy though. After the Córdoba trip I realized there was no getting around it anymore, I needed a business card. This of course sequenced. I couldn’t order cards without a logo. And then again, oops, a business card has the URL… which had better land on a functioning homepage… which shouldn’t be a blog… which can’t be in English.

For reasons which really make no sense, I’ve been doing everything myself instead of hiring it out. That’s probably not the smartest thing for Transrio the business, but it’s been a nice thing for Pete the person. I care about having minimal basic fluency in publishing. I honestly don’t know why, it certainly makes sense to leave all that to pros, everything is so easy for them. But the learning part is seriously fun for me, so I keep going. Hopefully in the long-long run it will pay off somehow. Today, I’m studying the newer body fonts for screen display, so I can intelligently choose a pretty but functional CSS font-stack.

So that’s where I’ve gone for the past month. There’s not much to show yet. But here’s the logo so far, for your entertainment:

This definitely is not the final version. I like the knot, but for the lettering I’ll be going with a legitimate font, not handwriting. And I’m still playing with colors.

All for now; more later.

Filed by Pete under Progress notes
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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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Laura & I are back after a quick trip to Córdoba. It was mostly just a fun vacation; Laura stayed two weeks, I stayed three. The first week we learned the city and took Spanish classes; the second week we went to the mountains for hiking. The third week I was by myself, and worked a little on Transrio. Nothing big, but I was proud of myself. I had ten meetings in four days, all in Spanish of course. This was more a credit to the natural easiness of Córdobese folk, than to any ability I might have with the language. Still, it was a lift to my confidence.

I narrowed down my focus for Transrio to franchising, and agriculture. Franchising for obvious reasons, and agriculture because it’s all-pervasive in Argentina, especially in the province of Córdoba, and has such strong parallels to the United States. Agriculture was my original love before Great Harvest. I met with people in both businesses, franchising and agriculture. It was quite encouraging, and now I need to keep working, and do the follow-up.

Looking back on the trip, it seemed quite ordinary — Córdoba is a very comfortable city as cities go, easy to feel at home in (no small credit to Natalia) and the three weeks went quickly. It seems surprising now that actually this was the first time we’ve been able to meet Natalia in person. She and I have been working together on little projects for years. And it was also our first time ever in Córdoba itself, even though that’s been the official physical address and phone number for Transrio, for years. So overall, a great trip, worth every penny of the plane ticket. 90% vacation, but the little bit that I counted toward work was really, really worth it. I learned a ton every day I was there, and I feel energized now with lots of new ideas.

Filed by Pete under Franchising,Progress notes
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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…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
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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…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language,Recommendations
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For the last few weeks I’ve been filling in all the dead-air that I had after March 2009. I’ve written six new posts, assembling them from leftover parts by reporting on projects which I had wanted to write about, but couldn’t. It’s been fun, because by doing that many in a row I smoothed out the posting process itself. It gave me practice, and I got to debug a few things along the way.

So today I hopped online, looked at the things I’d written, felt really pretty good about it all — and immediately got that familiar creepy feeling: "No Backup." (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Progress notes
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This little blog has been quietly sitting here, patient and all alone, ever-expectant for my return. I went missing in action, March 2009. That’s over a year. Transrio itself has received almost zero attention from me that entire time. I won’t go into why. Laura and I got waylaid by an all-consuming project of greater urgency. But now I’m thinking, finally, I might be able to put things back on track.

Today I skimmed my old stuff, re-familiarizing with this blog and Transrio. The whole thing still feels worthwhile. Since I’m not in a race with anyone I’ll just call it an embarrassing bubble in the pipeline and continue where I was. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Progress notes
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I went to the bank last week, and I had my computer Joe slung over my shoulder just in case I needed something. It turned out to be a good thing because I was missing some account info. While I was looking it up I could see my banker was watching with quite a bit of curiosity. Finally she said "Wow, that’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen an iPad before."

Now Joe is a lot of things, but he’s definitely not an iPad. Just for starters, he’s a 3 pound ruggedized brick, built for construction sites. He’s all Windows. He might be portable, as real computers go, but still he’s full-size. My banker is a smart person. It’s just that for many people the iPad is the first slate they’ve run across.

iPad’s ARE beautiful. Much more beautiful than Joe. I got to play with one “˜til my heart content, at the Apple store in Salt Lake when they first came out. Now… I’m keenly aware that the world doesn’t need another blogger jabbering about the iPad. But because I have five years of computing exclusively on a slate, I did see that I was having an entirely different experience than the other people in the Apple store. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
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I’ve now had my new computer, Joe, three full months, plenty of time for bonding. My old computer Moe is pushing five years old. Here’s a family portrait:

Joe is just the next generation on Moe. They’re both slates as you can see, from Motion Computing. Moe was my favorite computer of all time, and Joe is just better yet. Since a sweet computer is one of the three pillars of Pete’s happiness (and the other two are also doing very well right now) I’m feeling quite cheery.

Prior to Moe I was what you would call an "advanced keyboarder," one of those guys with a bevy of speedy shortcuts and macros, all second nature. I loved my keyboard; I still love keyboards. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
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I’m a tablet guy, so I scribble constantly when I work without thinking about it. Most of my productive output, even in Excel or Word, is a mixture of regular text and digital ink. The minute I started writing things online I just naturally hand-wrote along, doodling as I went. Boom! I hit a brick wall. I seriously wasn’t expecting it, either. For some dumb reason I thought it would be easy to draw on a blog or a webpage, the same as it is in e-mails, web clippings, documents, or PDFs.

Well holy smoke, was I ever wrong.

So being stubborn to a fault when it comes to computers, I’ve bogged down horribly, setting things up so I can scribble anything I want to on a webpage. For starters, it took me awhile to even understand what graphical people were talking about. I don’t have an art background. I had to bump around, trying random drawing programs, before I even "got" that there’s this chasm of difference between vector and raster.

If you’re like me and never knew squat from vectors, here’s how it shakes out. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Ink blogging,Recommendations
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