Cell phone giant Cingular (for full disclosure: not my provider) has applied for a groundbreaking patent. We can only speculate how many decades of research and how much funding has been necessary to develop this true innovation: a button to insert emoticons into text.

A method and system for generating a displayable icon or emoticon form that indicates the mood or emotion of a user of the mobile station. A user of a device, such as a mobile phone, is provided with a dedicated key or shared dedicated key option that the user may select to insert an emoticon onto a display or other medium. The selection of the key or shared dedicated key may result in the insertion of the emoticon, or may also result in the display of a collection of emoticons that the user may then select from using, for example, a key mapping or navigation technique.

More about this innovative technology here.

Technical translators should be encouraged by the International Technical Communications Special Interest Group article Reducing Translation Costs.

In the end, we found that machine translation created more hassles than it fixed. It was hard to explain to upper management, but the concept that helped most was explaining that translators aren’t translating word for word, they’re translating thought for thought. They are essentially rewriting the manual.

The ITC SIG of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) publishes a Translation Kit as well a Localization Reader.

Gail Armstrong on parenting. We’re not quite done yet ourselves, but I had conveniently supressed a lot of memories. Her post brought it all back. Like when we lost our carefully prepared gender-neutral approach (and the notion that parent’s are the strongest force in a child’s development) on our daughter’s first day of kindergarten.

You can do your damndest to avoid inculcating traditional notions of gender, but friends and TV will be more convincing, and I continue to be thoroughly flummoxed by the appeal of skanky singers and starlets as definitions of beauty or success.

Im letzten Oktober unternahm die Forschungsstelle „Neue Kommunikationsmedien“ der Universität Bamberg eine Umfrage mit dem Thema „Wie ich blogge?!“ Über 5000 Personen nahmen teil, und erste Ergebnisse liegen nun vor.

I just noticed that I am listed as “Dr. Michael Wahlster” in the donor list of the COE of the University of Missouri-Columbia. Let me correct this mistake; I do not have a doctorate. As we say in our family: One doctor in the house is enough.

The magic request to get your cell phone freed from the bond to a specific provider is “SIM Subsidy Unlock” – that is, if you have a GSM phone. Here in the U.S., T-Mobile (formerly Voicestream before a financial infusion from the the pink giant of Germany) makes it a snap to get your phone unlocked. You call customer service, say the magic phrase, give them the phone’s IMEI number, and 24 hours later an SMS arrives with instructions on how to unlock your phone.

Even though coverage of T-Mobile is not the greatest, their willingness to unlock phones, their very reasonable prepaid SIM cards, their reasonable rates for overseas calls, and their almost reasonable rates for global roaming (certainly a whole lot more reasonable than the competition) make them the logical choice for GSM.

PS: Weiß einer, was „SIM Subsidy Unlock“ auf Deutsch ist?

Looking for a truely cheap prepaid SIM card in Australia? Forget the big names and check out the Revolution (Slogan: Be Revolting!). It runs on the Vodafone network and is seriously cheaper than anything else. Only available over the Internet. Recharge at newsagents or via Internet.

If you have a GSM phone that is locked to a specific provider, you need to get it unlocked.

At the beginning of December I stumbled onto a video about sushi which was really hilarious – surprising since I never would have thought that Japanese were able to make fun of themselves. I was in the middle of trying to finish up a pile of work before leaving for Australia and had no time to blog about it but I passed it on to one-time fellow Edo resident isabo.

As it turned out, the Google video clip by Junji Kojima was illegally lifted of a video collection and Google has since removed the file. But fear not. If you haven’t seen the short which describes the proper behavior in a すしや with dry irony, you can see it (together with other short clips) on the distributor’s webpage: The Japanese Tradition –Sushi–. Warning: no English subtitles.

In case you are into other aspects of Japanese tradition, I was able locate another one of the Namikibashi shorts on another site (but I suspect that it is not an authorized copy): The Japanese Tradition –Dogeza–.

Addendum: The links are down again, or changed. As of August 2006, the Dogeza short seems to have disappeared, and the Sushi short is available on YouTube.

After some very relaxing days down under I am back in Missouri and in the land of unlimited Broadband. Very relaxing with one exception: It was not so easy to come by fast Internet connections in Australia. Even in the middle of Sydney I could only pick up two wireless networks, both encrypted. While on the Queensland coast, I had to trek up to Starbucks in one of the big shopping malls, and even there Broadband Internet was not free. Access was via Telstra and they charged hefty connections fees. I had serious Internet withdrawal symptoms. Not quite as bad as Joi Ito on his Lufthansa flight 710 from Frankfurt to Tokyo, though.

But here in mid-Missouri every coffee shop, every eatery worth its salt offers free WiFi – the city council wants to make the whole downtown a free WiFi zone. Downtown St. Louis is already, so is Kansas City airport.

But it doesn’t have to be free, just available and reasonably priced. Internet connection on the L.A. to Sydney flight would have made that incredibly long haul a whole lot more bearable.