Three Things I Learned
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | 20:47
Following Sarah Dillon’s (There’s Something About Translation) Twitter updates, I learned that
- It is hot in Brisbane,
- Jost Zetzsche has (well, had) a session today at the Translator as Strategic Partner Conference in London with the topic “Does quality spell usability?” and
- I should prepare before attending a conference.
3. Conference Preparation
Sarah linked in one of her Tweets to the post 5 Goals I Set Before Attending a Conference in Social Impressions, a blog by Reem Abeidoh. I can relate to the blog post – except that when I go to translator conferences, I am not looking to meet vendors but colleagues to cooperate with and buyers in need of my services. The main point of the post, however, is to prepare, to set goals for a conference and to follow through.
2. London Conference
Jost is everywhere, it seems. I just had a discussion with him in Orlando and here he is giving a talk in London. Between today’s Italian lunch and tomorrow’s Caribbean lunch there are sessions such as “TM is dead! Long live CMS!” and “It’s not what you want to give the client, it’s what the client needs.” With transatlantic airfares at seriously low levels, this would have been a good opportunity to have a trip to London as a tax write-off.
1. Brisbane
The city is a hot place in summertime. I am, as I like to describe it, Australian by marriage, and I lived in Chelmer and Kedron for brief periods several decades ago. I seem to remember that temperatures don’t hit triple digits until around Christmas, though. And nobody had a/c back then, which made it easier to go in and out of the house. Suffering from the heat, Sarah is wondering where she’d like to live next. How about just down the road in Burleigh on the water with a nice breeze?
Conclusion
Twitter updates, albeit short, can convey a lot of information and link to more expanded versions of the data. Tweets can be pushed to the phone of those following the updates of a particular person so that they stay informed even away from the computer and without actively checking a web site. Twitter updates can be made from the phone, i.e from virtually anywhere and with no special equipment or connectivity requirement. I’m doing my trial runs on Twitter and so far I like what I see.
Sunday, 23. November 2008
The heat thing is all relative – I’m not a warm-weather person by any stretch of the imagination so anything over 25C starts to offend
I’m not giving up on Brisbane just yet but our next move, when it does come, is likely to be back to the wilds of the west of Ireland for a while. At least until the next bout of wanderlust sets in 
Glad you’re enjoying Twitter. I like it because I can give a bit more personal context to my professional online presence – as you’ve shown in this post! People use it in plenty of other ways too, of course. I think the key to making it work is to view it in the context of everything else you are doing, online and offline, and be quite clear on what you want to achieve with it. Otherwise it can feel like a bit of a time waste. But sometimes that’s OK too!
Sunday, 23. November 2008
This is completely not translation-related, but one of my favorite holiday memories is of an Australian friend who was in the States for Christmas saying that “…it just doesn’t feel like Christmas with all of this snow and ice…” Many years later when I was in Australia in the middle of the “winter” (February), I had the same confusion issues with people saying things like “If it’s hot down here” (this was in Melbourne) “imagine what they’re enduring up North.”
Sunday, 23. November 2008
LOL! It’s funny how much our sense of weather, seasons and holidays are culture bound – definitely makes for some very surreal situations!
I guess Lesson No. 1 here should be that Twitter’s taught you not that it’s hot in Brisbane, but that Sarah Dillon thinks it’s hot in Brisbane
Monday, 24. November 2008
You are right, Sarah. I remember my first December in Queensland (and Australia). It was quite disorienting. I even had to cautiously find out if “Winter” referred to the December/January/February stretch or to the cold season. Thinking about it now makes me cringe. I’m glad my in-laws didn’t throw me back.