On a recent trip from London’s Luton Airport, I encountered this helpful chap, who was on-hand to provide some guidance on how best to navigate one’s way through customs.
I’m sure this is quite a common technological advance at airports across the world, but it’s the first time I’ve seen such tech used first-hand. It’s like something from Total Recall.
It’s the bane of every blogger. Comment spam, blog spam…whatever you want to call it, has reached epidemic proportions. Bloggers from all backgrounds set aside time to sift through the steady stream of pseudo-comments that sit waiting for ‘approval’.
Most experienced bloggers can spot a counterfeit comment from a hundred yards. The grammar is normally passable, and it often adopts a rather complimentary approach, but it just never seems quite right.
A quick perusal of the thousand-odd comments awaiting approval on my own blog (most of the comments will never see the light of day, I must add…), reveals where the spammers are going wrong.
To read more on this, check out my piece over at The Next Web: ¿Habla Spamglish? Speaking the language of spambots.
Has it really been six years since YouTube first took to the online airwaves? No, not quite. But a month from now will see that magic milestone reached, so I went in search for the first ever YouTube video…and I found it.
Uploaded at 8.27pm on Saturday 23rd of April, 2005, YouTube’s inaugural video starred company co-founder Jawed Karim. It’s not terribly exciting, and it lasts a mere eighteen seconds, but it’s a historical moment nonetheless.
The ‘Me at the zoo‘ video is Karim standing in front of a herd of elephants at San Diego Zoo. His main insight is that these elephants have “really, really, really…long trunks”.
Anyway…watch it for yourself here:
I’ve never been duped by spam, and I aim to keep it that way.
But Thursday was the closest I’ve come yet to being even remotely fooled by a digital fraudster. How? Here’s how.
I never, ever do the National Lottery. But on Wednesday I did – and I bought my ticket online. The jackpot was around the £3m mark.
So when I got this email in my inbox on Thursday, I was very excited:
The Web may have made the world a smaller place, but it hasn’t done all that much to bridge the linguistic divides that encumber businesses when doing business and travellers when, well, travelling.
That said, the internet has spawned the likes of Google Translate to help those seeking to converse with people of other linguistic persuasions. But let’s face it, online translation tools have very limited application, especially if you’re jetting off on a jungle-trekking excursion to Cambodia.
And this, of course, is where a little pocket phrase book or nifty iPhone app. may come in handy – so there are options for those wishing to venture into new territories without getting into translation tangles. But some words simply don’t translate all that well.
So I’ve done a little research. And the outcome is this compendium of phrases that apparently drive even the most tranquil of translators to despair.
