Article in JmakTech on the advantages of Twitter over other tools when it comes to job search and networking. Quote:

I personally have found Twitter to be more effective than LinkedIn in growing my professional network. This is mainly because on LinkedIn, I generally only add colleagues and friends I have already worked with in the past or know personally. You are free to follow anyone on Twitter you want to connect with that may have similar or common interests.

I don’t follow social networking sites all that much. What usually happens is that I would like a functionality for one of my sites and then I go trolling the Internet to see where I can find it. After over 500 posts in this blog, I feel a bit differently about Twitter than in the past and think that I would like to try it more. But 140 characters max? That’s when I stumbled upon Utterli. Could that be of help? Voice posts, even from cell phones, then a link in Twitter? Check it out. If it is still around in a couple of months, it may be worth a second look.

When Windows users (such as myself) see a blue screen, the adrenalin starts pumping and they ask themselves when they last backed up their data. About ten days ago, a blue CHKDSK screen showed up when I started my computer. The utility was scanning drive D: but found no bad sectors. No reason to panic, I thought.

However, at each subsequent system start, cold or warm, the same disk checking process ran on drive D:, always with the same negative result. That really made me worried. What if this wasn’t just a glitch but the first sign of impending desaster? I went through my start-up files but couldn’t find a trigger for the disk check. I tried to defrag the partition, but, ironically, couldn’t without first running CHKDSK – which had me stuck in a loop. Seagate’s disk diagnostics wouldn’t run since my harddrives are attached to a RAID controller.

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Television is essential to my overall wellness. It’s my only distraction from the endless, unceasing California sunshine that refuses to get off my damn lawn.

Diablo Cody

My favorite screenwriter has directed his first film. (Rereading this sentence I am wondering if one can have a favorite screenwriter, but there!) Tomorrow, Friday the 24th, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York will come to the theaters. In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Ordoña describes the movie like this:

… a superb watchmaker has gone mad, taking the viewer on a tour of the inner workings of one of Dalí’s clocks.

Can’t wait to see it.

… and 49 other favorite words as listed by BBC News Magazine.

If you are too lazy to click, here are the top five:

1. Defenestrate
2. Poodle-faker
3. Omphaloskepsis
4. Mallemaroking
5. Spanghew

Interested now?

Michael (Metzger) sent out invitations to a picnic in Golden Gate park, and people came from all over. Since it was my birthday last Saturday, I decided to fly up to San Francisco and be there – it was a beautiful day, brilliantly blue sky, sunshine, much cooler than SoCal but the right weather for spending a day in the park. I had a couple of beers, tried the BBQ and Michael’s famous home-made potato salad, and rubbed elbows with the localization crème de la crème of Silicon Valley. A good time was had by all.

To top off the day, I then attended the 30th anniversary dinner of the Northern California Translators Association (NCTA) in the Empress of China restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown (according to a display on the wall, even Bush 41 had been to try their cuisine). There were quite a few familiar faces, and it was a very well attended affair.

At the end of the evening, I could tell that it had been a long day and all I wanted to do was to crash to be ready for my early morning flight back home. Too bad that it is too far (and far too expensive) to to this on a regular basis. NCTA is a very active group, whereas, strangely enough, Southern California has no local translators organization.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports (based on AP) that Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has put a damper on the hopes of American writers in advance of next week’s announcement of the Nobel Price in Literature.

The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature … That ignorance is restraining.

(Emphasis is mine.)