Why is so hard to find our neighbours?

30 Nov 2007

In Space Radio: More Static, Less Talk we learn how hard it would be to detect alien signals. Also about an formula to figure out how many intelligent lifeforms their might be in our galaxy.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

27 Nov 2007

I’m about 1/4 of the way into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier somewhere in the supposed play by Shakespeare revealing the first 007, oh what a trip. Strongly recommended.

Well, at least it's a good list of the other reasons I like him

12 Sep 2007

from reddit Ron Paul is Seriously Flawed as a Candidate; We’re Just So in Love With Him That We’re Not Paying Attention …. Except everything they list as reasons he’s flawed I agree with. It’s just more reasons to love the guy.

#politics

Breaking the silence

17 Aug 2007

So… there’s over a year gap between this post and the last. At some point my email to blog script broke and I was just too damn busy to fix it. The week the server I was running the blog broke and I had to move the services on it. While in NY last year I wrote a blog using Django, and while installing the new server I installed that and polished it up a bit. Goodbye pybloxom, I never did submit all the patches I wrote for you.

I need to clean up a bit of spam on this site. Seems like some spammers found my trac sites for some of the projects I had listed here and had a little fun. I have two trac.db files that are 300mb full of spam.

Shouts out to Steven N. and Zooko.

LISA: How to get Management Buy-in for Strong Localization Support

27 Jun 2006

Heike Caldwell, Localization Manager, Rockwell Automation. How to get Management Buy-in for Strong Localization Support.

• apply Lean Enterprise principles (is this like Lean Manufacturing)
• (she’s reading right off the slides).
• Use simple language, expect a lot of questions.
• Why not only use English, because your competitors are doing it.
• Rockwell only has a site in English. Globalization in progress.
• Holistic approach. Taking into account business, region, subjects (not labeled on the slide) in a single process.
• (I’m thinking of starting a fire to warm myself. I guess they are scared people are going to fall asleep.)
• LEAN Enterprise, one step below 6 Sigma (look this up).
• (It’s a challenge to figure out how to scale down some of their solutions for RS).
• % of overall sales vs. cost of localization: less than 1%.

(so far the focus seems to be on technical products manuals, technical product marketing. I’m very unsure these approaches apply to an educational product like RS.)

• “we give these vendors so much business that the pricing went down”

(One guys asking a question was from the World Bank, another from the European Commission)

(Who is our localization Czar?)

• The presenter is the only one doing localization full time at Rockwell.

(oh look, some guy in jeans. at this point I’d rather have a parka).

#lisa2006nyc