If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,

and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,

he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

- Henry David Thoreau in Walden

It has been a long hard road. But I have pushed on down it nonetheless.
And I find myself in a stronger state at the end of this year. With new confidence and skill I look forward to beating down new paths in untraveled territory.

As I have mentioned on this blog before I have created and use my own quirky productivity systems. They have revolutionised my personal life making me able to take on much more and focus on life’s most important things. Of course having a month more than everyone else helps in that. Yes, my calendar has 13 months!

I am now in my 13th month of 2010, and as part of that I am busy reflecting on the past year and planning goals for the future.

The theme of my 13th month this year is “visualising The Man I Want To Become.”
The mind is a powerful tool and what we fill it with and focus it on sets our life course.
So I think it fitting that I devote at least this month to actively and diligently examining what I think about, how I think, and why I think the way I do.

But that is more than what I have time to talk about in this post. (this very random post)

I want to talk about the events of the last year.
I took a beating this year. Life kept hitting me again and again. BUT every blow has made me stronger!

This year I have learnt to living differently. Continuing along the lines of 2009 and my location-free living experiments I have grown even more mobile and have learnt to survive and thrive with little.
And in the face of countless obstacles somehow accomplishments broke through them all; first as trickling waters and then as mighty torrents.

This year I completed a migration of my websites over to a wordpress multisite setup; this will enable me to grow them in ways I could not before.
I grew in my skill with wordpress, php, site design, etc. and am laying the ground work for a project I love – MyOnlineShowroom.com.
While running my own business with retained clients, I managed my friend’s business AND (while engaged in both of those activities) interviewed for, landed, got frustrated and quit two web dev/SEO jobs, and am now working a fun government job that leaves my mornings free – all in a down economy!
I mention this knowing that it has nothing at all to do with me. It has everything to do with principles and how they are set fixed unmovable in place.
If you knock on enough doors, you will find an opening. If you work hard and serve, it will bear fruit somehow. (Make sure to show appreciation all along the way)
More than that, I mention it because although these things (maybe) seem like great accomplishments at the time (throughout this whole year) I had nothing but stress and distress. But viewed at another angle (something a great guy I worked under briefly at web dev job #2 taught me how to do)… WOW what experience this year has given me!

2011 is upon us, advance confidently!

UPDATE: It was due likely to a plugin that was incompatible. Or that I created an export file while plugins on that wp install were still activated (a no-no). Fixed now. But the migration goes on…

It will make by website administration and maintenance MUCH easier. May give details later.

For now,

I am re-building things back to the original. so some things missing currently

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq1dow1vTHY

So Google put a new face on Google Translate and made it live. And today silly people like me everywhere are giving G plenty of linkjuice linking back to the article.

Aesthetically it is an appealing change. How much else changed I don’t know because I am more excited that there is something new than un-lazy (it must be a word in some language) enough to actually research before posting here.

I am interested to see if any of this will help me with improving my Chinese (I am learning Chinese now)

Looks like they have sync’d Google translate with some of their other products (ex:gmail) in a way that will increase productivity. Nice.

And there is now “translated search” which for some reason I seem to remember already existing… ?
(That might be because I am a Japan web nerd and for years have been using online dictionaries and tools -- Rikai -- that give dropdown box translation of page words on-the-fly. )

Anyhoo, it looks good. Nice job G.

“But just how does Google create these nifty translations,” you ask?
What the video.
it’s Robots.

Automated computer algorithms. Hmmm.
I could almost go for that up until the point where they say about grammatical rules “Instead of teaching the computer the rules, we let the computers figure out the rules for themselves.”
They try to justify this statement by saying that the computers analyse a billion pages of documents that have already been translated into multiple languages by human translator and the computer looks for similarities between the texts…
Wait a minute. So you are saying that you feed the computer a bunch of documents and let it GUESS what the equivalent words and phrases are across the documents.
Some non-technical people don’t understand why automated translations can sometime come out so off the mark.

But after hearing this, now I cannot believe that Google’s translations are not twice as bad as they are.
Mechanically generated literal translations are not likely to catch the nuances and complex phraseology of living languages. And, being that these languages are indeed LIVING, they will be constantly changing and forever dependant on context.

A very interesting video.
And I like how when they mention the trouble they have with grammar in translation they display a Japanese and English flag.
Yeah, Japanese and English grammar are about as opposite as the poles. There are many words in Japanese that have absolutely no [set] English translation and can only be understood by a longer explanation of the context. For instance, “Natsukashii” (なつかしい) is a Japanese adjective that is often used by itself as an interjection when someone is reminded by something of some other thing from their past that they were fond of. The closest thing conceptually to this in English would be the interjection “Isn’t this nostalgic?!” which I have never heard anyone say.
By itself Google translates natsukashii as “miss,” (as in “to miss” something). Somethings will always be lost in translation…

My advice: be aware of the limitations. use sparingly. only translate small sentences at a time.

It was too funny not to post.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek

So, today Google Japan (google.co.jp) had this interesting doodle.
Figuring that it was on the Google.com domain as well I surfed over there only to be disappointed by the regular old Google homepage.

Investigating the Japan doodle, I found that it was related to Gábor Dénes (Dennis Gabor) the Hungarian genius that invented the hologram.

Wikipedia Japan page:

ガーボル・デーネシュ (Gábor Dénes) (1900年 6月5日 ブダペスト生まれ – 1979年 2月9日 ロンドンにて死去) はハンガリーの物理学者でホログラフィーを発明した人である。なお、デニス・ガボールとも表記されるが、ハンガリーは日本と同じように名前が姓・名の順であるので正しくはガーボル・デーネシュと表記される。

彼は1947年に電子顕微鏡の解像度を向上させる研究の中でホログラフィーを発明した。このホログラフィーはインライン型ホログラフィーと呼ばれる像を鮮明に観察できない形式ものであった。これは当時レーザーがなかったため、コヒーレント長の短い光源を利用せざるを得なかったからである。そのため1960年にレーザーが発明されるまでこの発明が注目を集めることはなかった。しかし、レーザーの発明によって脚光を浴び、1971年にノーベル物理学賞を受賞することになった。

Interestingly the Wikipedia Japan page says that he was working on increasing the resolution of electron microscopes when he discovered Holograpy. But it was not until the invention of the laser in 1960 that he could create his hologram. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize.
Also, interestingly in Hungarian they put there names last-name-first, just like the Japanese and Chinese.

Well, none of that gives me any clue as to why he would be remembered on Google Japan and not on the main Google page. Weird.

Yes, it has become this bad…

(a post in craigslist Miami, under computer gigs)

Actually why not work at wal-mart? Can you believe the nerve of these people offering sub-standard pay for technical gigs? If you don’t value our services, don’t come to us just do it yourself. I’m not going to build you a custom CRM site for 70 bucks. I’m not going to develop a custom php/mysql database for you for $10.00 an hour. I’m not going to give you free copies of Windows 7 and I’m certainly not hungry enough sell my soul dirt cheap.

You people offering sub-standard rates and wanting the world should be ashamed of yourselves. If your business is failing so badly that you have to try and force people to work for peanuts then think about changing your business model.

To those of you looking for work, don’t pay much attention to the “computer gig” postings…there’s a reason people post here versus the web design jobs section, to post a computer gig is free and they can’t afford to pay you anyway. Also, don’t belittle yourselves by working for 50% less than what you should. I know times are tough for some but if you’re going to work for $10 an hour just apply at Publix or Walmart and save your dignity.

Wow. Business owners not offering adequate pay for technical work is a disgusting shame. The point about the gig listings not being of the same caliber as job listings is well noted. But I have had my own, very bitter, experiences with the jobs I have had from the job listings section and can assure you that they are not much better.

It is a bear of a job opportunity market out there.

They used to say, “Don’t quit your day job”

My advice these days is, “Don’t quit your side projects!”

It has been my side projects that have given me the best experience and will someday soon hopefully allow me to leave the world of day jobs all together.

Quick-rant.

So my best friend (whom I met in Tokyo) is British Canadian.

He convinced me of the merit of British English (spelling), as it is real English.

So I always write to him with the best English spelling I can muster (as one born American).

Today I found a great aid to that – an online spell checker.
Most PCs here are set to American spelling and without this SAAS spell checker if you found yourself in a situation where you could not add or switch to English you would be out of luck.

I work a lot with Picasa.
Today I has trying to edit some new photos for a client in picasa but picasa was not scanning the folder properly so that no photos were coming up.

Some Googling produced this Picasa troubleshooter.