Posted in Technology on July 2, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Skype is a fantastic tool, especially for those of us who remember the days of $100+ phone bills for calls to other countries. I like to keep Skype running while I’m working, so that if I want to ask a colleague a quick question, I can easily see if the person is online and send [...]
Posted in Technology, Treadmill desks on June 30, 2008 | 10 Comments »
I’ve now been using my treadmill desk for about six weeks, and the concise update is that I love it. I find it easy to work at and much more pleasant than sitting in a chair all day, and I’ve also found that I can do almost all of my translation and related work while [...]
Posted in Nubbin, Technology, Translation quality on June 30, 2008 | No Comments »
A while ago, I wrote about both my love of the free and open source translation environment tool OmegaT and my frustration with tags in OmegaT. Since then, I’ve found that the easiest solution, as long as the document doesn’t contain complex formatting, is to save the document as plain text, then translate in OmegaT [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Links, Technology on June 13, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Credit for the new header image: “Cambodian Sanskrit in the temples of Angkor” by iStock member Yangshuo.
Michelle Rafter has a great post this morning called Time Out, on the merits of unplugging from your computer. In the post, Michelle references another blog post from a writer who takes a “technology sabbath” from Friday evening [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Technology on June 12, 2008 | 1 Comment »
After reading Jill Sommer’s post on job tracking systems for freelancers (for what it’s worth, I used to use a white board, then I switched to post-it notes, now I use a paper planner, but I agree that some sort of system is imperative), I thought I would write something about income tracking systems.
As [...]
Posted in Technology, tagged MS Word keyboard shortcuts, technology tips on June 4, 2008 | 11 Comments »
During Jamie Lucero’s computer seminar that I mentioned below, he gave a small but incredibly useful tip that very few of us had ever seen. In Microsoft Word, highlight some text and then press Shift+F3. The text will toggle between CAPS, no caps and Initial Caps. This prompted such a “wow” from the audience that [...]
Posted in Technology on May 26, 2008 | 4 Comments »
I’m still very, very happy with my recent switch from Heartsome to OmegaT, but one thing I’m still mastering in OmegaT is the use of tags in formatted documents.
Tags in OmegaT aren’t a big issue if your translation work consists of documents that don’t have much formatting, or in which the formatting isn’t very important. [...]
Posted in Freelancing, Marketing, Technology on May 21, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Like many independent professionals these days, I’ve started using a few social networking tools such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn and MySpace. My experience with them is fairly limited, but I’ve been thinking about some of the positives and negatives of using these websites for networking and marketing.
To me, the primary advantage of social networking sites [...]
Posted in Technology, Treadmill desks on May 9, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I will go back to writing translation-specific posts, but here’s an update on the treadmill desk based on my (admittedly still limited!) experiences this week.
So far I still really like it, the adjustment has actually been much easier than I thought. I had planned to start by using it a few hours at a time, [...]
Posted in Technology, Treadmill desks on May 7, 2008 | 18 Comments »
As one of those translators who’s always said, “I love everything about my job except sitting at a desk all day,” I’ve been intrigued for a while by the idea of the treadmill desk. Exercising while you work has been in the news of late, ever since Dr. James Levine, an obesity researcher at the [...]
