For those who think that L.A. is all cars and freeways and traffic jams, there are two surprises:

First, believe it or not, there is public transportation in the L.A. area. It is rather limited, no doubt, and subscribing to the Metrolink tweets (@Metrolink) can be a disheartening experience, especially if you expect your commuter trains to run on time – or to run, for that matter. But it is possible to get around and you will see (and hear) things you wouldn’t from the confines of your car. Last July, the L.A. Times had an audio slide show about the Blue Line which connects downtown and Long Beach. It nicely reflects the experience of taking a train in Los Angeles.

 

Second, even less expected, Los Angeles has many, many areas ready to be discovered on foot. I was probably too much influenced by the 1983 Missing Persons hit Walking in L.A. with its repeated line “nobody walks in L.A.” to even consider exploring the city this way. Then I discovered Walking L. A.: 38 Walking Tours Exploring Stairways, Streets and Buildings You Never Knew Existed by Erin Mahoney Harris and City Walks: Los Angeles: 50 Adventures on Foot by Eric Hiss and illustrator Bart Wright. The walks described are of various lengths and difficulties. And when I say “difficulties” I mean that some have steep ascends and long, seemingly never ending flights of stairs. I just explored one of the walks in the area between the Glendale Freeway and Silver Lake reservoir, and it is amazing how many streets turn into stairs and how small houses without any apparent vehicle access hug the steep hillsides. A decorated house on one of the hills reminded me of Antoni Gaudí – perhaps a fan built it as a homage to the Catalan architect. Whereas the 38 Walking Tours is a paperback, the 50 Adventures is a collection of individual, small card-sized and easy to carry maps.

So how about taking public transport to your next walking tour? Now that would be an L.A. experience!

A couple of languages are bouncing around in my head. The dominant ones are the language I use most often and my native language; the others are more or less on the back burner. I don’t get them mixed up. When I lived in Japan, many multi-lingual people were communicating in a kind of compound English/Japanese syntax (“I couldn’t make it last year, so kotoshi-wa zettai nanda kedo, I may be in Japan around this time”). I am not doing that. I keep my language output separated. But when I see written words, I often look at them as German words even if they are not. The results can be quite funny. At least I think so – just like some sort of multi-language pun.

Speaker at ATA conference with
QR code tag. Click to enlarge.

Mobile tagging is widely used in Asia, especially in Japan. It describes the process of supplying data through a two-dimensional bar code that can be read and interpreted by a mobile device, such as a cell phone. The idea is that you point your smart phone at the code, the application takes a picture, decodes the information, and your phone then takes the appropriate action: call the website if the encoded information is a URL, dials the number if the information is a phone number, etc.

The two-dimensional bar code most often encountered is probably the QR code (QR = Quick Response), developed as far back as 1994 by Denso. If you store numeric information only, the QR code has a capacity of 7,089 characters. With alphanumeric information it is still 4,296 characters. In the U.S., the acceptance of QR codes has been slow. I guess one of the reasons is that so few phones support the scanning of the codes, and even those who have QR code scanning capabilities usually do not do such a great job.

My Blackberry is able to scan QR codes. The function is buried several layers deep, though. Find your BlackBerry Messenger (which is in the Instant Messaging folder on my phone), click on it, select Scan Group Barcode and follow the instructions. This scanning function is only available in version 5.0 or higher of the Blackberry Messenger. My daughter’s Android phone has an add-on for scanning QR codes. The scanning accuracy is a whole lot better than the BlackBerry’s. Other smart phones probably have similar add-ons.

Nordstrom’s recent print ad with QR code.

QR codes look cool and can be very useful. There are numerous on-line applications that let you create QR codes. And if you wonder where to use them, think for a moment in which situations other people have to type or write down information you give them. Those are the ideal situations for introducing QR codes. You can encode your contact information and put it on business cards, you can encode the URL of your website, your blog or your Twitter account and add it at the end of articles in a newsletter or on-line posts, you can encode a Google map location and add it to a printed invitation. There are as many ways to use QR codes as you can come up with.

Go to Flickr and check out QR Codes in the wild. Step into the wonderful world of two-dimensional codes.

Google was in the news several times this past week, and not in a positive way.

First there was CEO Eric Schmidt’s mind-boggling (well, mind-boggling only if you have been buying the Don’t-Be-Evil image that Google has been trying so hard to establish) assessment of privacy “[that] If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Then came the New York Times announcement (which I cannot find on-line) that Google, a long-time and very vocal advocate of Net Neutrality had made a deal with telecom giant Verizon to speed certain web traffic for a fee, violating those very principles of Net Neutrality. The report was followed by denials all around.

And then finally I read this morning that Brian Reid prevailed against Google before the California Supreme Court (the decision is here as a Word document). He was fired by Google in 2004, just days before the company’s IPO, despite his impressive track record in his profession and seemingly great evaluations by his employer. The timing of the firing cost him his stock options, a not inconsiderable amount of money. But the basis of his suit was age discrimination. The L.A. Times article (which I cannot find on-line; here is the SF Weekly blog post instead) listed as one of the “stray” comments by Google personnel that Reid was “too old to matter.”

It is very interesting and educational to read the Supreme Court document – especially if you belong to the age group that according to Google doesn’t matter anymore.

This blog runs on the WordPress platform. I switched from pre-Google Blogger to WordPress in June of 2005 drawn by its open-source php-based architecture, a helpful on-line community, and what was then a small number of third-party “themes,” which could be installed and used without too much trouble in most cases. Over the years, the number of no-cost themes for WordPress has mushroomed. There are so many out there that it is impossible to even catalogue them all. Sadly, most of them leave a lot to be desired.

This lead to the rise of the so-called “premium themes.” They were usually better designed and better coded, but they cost money. Prices vary widely, as does the quality, and the best ones are around for only a short time and then their developers seem to take them off the shelf.

It has become more and more common to use blogging software like WordPress for regular websites, not blogs. The advantages are that you can modify the content at any time through the administrator backend without altering or breaking the design of the site. I was looking for some reasonably designed themes that accommodate this “magazine style,” as it is called, when I came across the premium themes by Felix Krusch. He is about to release a new generation of his themes, and until then you can download all his premium themes for free!

If you are a WordPress user, check it out, there may be one you like.

Source: L.A. County Dpt of Public Health

After two years in L.A. County it is really only the traffic and the inflated property prices I can complain about – I know, it cannot get more cliché than that.

Over breakfast this morning I found an article in the L.A. Times about life expectancy in the area. It was based on a report on Life Expectancy in Los Angeles County published just a couple of days ago by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

The good news is that residents of Los Angeles County live about 2.6 years longer than the average American. The bad (and probably not entirely unexpected) news is that life expectancy, broken down by area, ethnicity, and economic status fluctuates a great deal, and the report tries to illuminate some of those stark disparities.

The most quotable piece (in my opinion) in the whole article is this:

Women in L.A. County live an average of 82.9 years, men 77.6. Coronary heart disease was the leading cause of premature death for both sexes, followed by homicide for men and breast cancer for women.

I’ll leave you with that thought.

[Later: And then it hit me; I should have referenced the movie, or at least the song.]

Even though I have moved a long way away from the grits line I am still a big fan of the the food. I can even get an “organic” version in one of our local vertically integrated, farmers-market type stores. Just the other day, though, I found the Spanish version of grits in the cereal aisle of our supermarket: Sémola de Maíz. It is a box of quick grits, and for best results you should really use the slow cooking kind. On the box, it shows fried eggs and grits, which is probably the most common way of serving grits, but also the least imaginative. If you feel adventurous, try this recipe for Baked Maple Grits with Wild Mushrooms and Country Ham. Yum.

USA Today mentioned today the Global Entry Program and how it lets you bypass immigration lines when you enter the U.S. Depending on the port of entry and the number of planes arriving at the same time, those lines can be brutal – whether you are a visitor or a citizen. I joined the Global Entry program a little over a year ago, and I talked about my experience in this blog before. If you have a U.S. passport or a Green Card and your travel overseas more than two or three times a year, you should definitely look into joining. The up-front bureaucratic hassle and the fee is well worth it.

It seems impossible that anyone working with computers and hard drives has not heard about the necessity of employing some sort of system for securing their files. Yet it is always shocking to find out how many translators give no thought to and spend no effort on securing their data, even though these data are the lifeblood of their business. It therefore makes sense to repeat the bleedin’ obvious.

The data residing on translators’ computers are in many (or even most) cases their most valuable assets and irreplaceable if the proper protective measures are missing. Hardware fails. It is not a question of if, but when. So it is a good idea to invest some thought and planning into a protection strategy. Once disaster strikes, it is too late.

In May, I attended the Symposium Looking to the Future: What’s Next for Translators and Interpreters held by the Mid-America Chapter of the American Translators Association (MICATA) in Kansas City. There, I gave a presentation on data security and confidentiality. You can find a short version of my presentation in the June issue of the ATA Chronicle (or in PDF here).

Update: Dodge County man hit, killed by Jeep while getting his mail identified

For this and similar, sometimes baffling, sometimes hilarious crash blossoms, check out Crash Blossoms.

*Newspaper headlines written in a telegraphic style which often omits the copula and therefore lends itself to syntactic ambiguity, usually of the garden path type.