I have a Former Life (FL) and a Present Life (PL). I make the distinction between them not because I moved from the New World to the Old. Not because my life changed when a long relationship ended. Not because I raised a child who left my nest. Not because of any ordinary milestone event.

I emptied my cache and clicked the refresh button on my life.

I live in Paris, where I’ve wanted to be my entire life, and I spend most of my time at my computer. But if it weren’t for my computer, I wouldn’t be here in the first place. I didn’t meet Vincent online, but we conducted our romance over the Internet for nearly a year before I got here. My novel, my art, my photos, my poetry, my 3 blogs, my website, my e-mail, Francophilia, my work—my brain, essentially—is in this computer (or on the Internet by way of this computer).

I have a number of good friends I’ve known for as long as 20 years who just don’t get it. In fact, I get the distinct impression that some of them have sincere concerns about my mental health. None of them have websites or blogs of their own. Not one! I created my website, and later my blog, to stay close to these distant friends, but it didn’t happen. Realizing they wouldn’t be following me through the looking glass was very painful, but I survived the five stages—and I really did go through them (here’s some denial)—and moved on.

There was a great article today in Le Monde 2 (the French equivalent of the NY Times or LA Times Sunday Magazine). Today’s edition was the annual special high-tech issue. The article was written by Claire Ulrich, a brilliant journalist friend of Vincent’s and mine (whom we met because we blog.) It’s entitled Plus belle, ma vie en ligne, and it’s all about just how rich an online life can be. Of course, it’s like anything else; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it:

Les plus grands bonheurs de la vie en ligne, ce sont les rencontres, les conversations passionnantes et les amitiés tissées autour des blogs, avec des êtres humains enfin débarassés de la quincaillerie des conventions, de l’âge, du physique et des hormones, du décalage horaire et de la distance.

[The greatest joys of online life come from meeting people, from impassioned conversations and friendships built around blogs with people who are no longer hindered by convention, age, physical appearance and hormones, time zones and distance.]

She’s right. The extraordinary people I’ve met from all over the world who do relate to my lifestyle have essentially replaced my FL friends. My online friends are more interested in what I think and do and feel these days. They’re far more communicative than my FL friends, and you know what? They get me. And I’m thrilled to be able to read their blogs and peek into their hearts and minds, to laugh and cry with them, to share. What are friends for, after all? Plus, these people know how to subscribe to my blog—and they do.

I asked my francophile friends, both FL and PL, to help me with Francophilia testing before it launched. My FL friends all knew this was something I’d wanted to do for a decade. But guess who showed up.

The article is beautifully written. Claire has somehow managed to retain a sense of wonder that most people have lost by the time they hit my age, and she makes you feel about the Internet the way Dorothy felt when she first gazed on the Emerald City. It will make you laugh and cry, so if you have the chance, pick it up. It’ll be on sale till tomorrow afternoon.

Vincent’s and my online love story is mentioned in the article! But ironically, not even the annual high-tech issue of Le Monde 2 is published online. So if you want a copy of the article, let me know and I’ll send you one. But don’t be expecting paper.

I have a Former Life (FL) and a Present Life (PL). I make the distinction between them not because I moved from the New World to the Old. Not because my life changed when a long relationship ended. Not because I raised a child who left my nest. Not because of any ordinary milestone event. I emptied my cache and clicked the refresh button on my life. I live in Paris, where I've wanted to be my entire life, and I spend most of my time at my computer. But if it weren't for my computer, I wouldn't be here in the first place. I didn't meet Vincent online, but we conducted our romance over the Internet for nearly a year before I got here. My novel, my art, my photos, my poetry, my 3 blogs, my website, my e-mail, Francophilia, my work—my brain, essentially—is in this computer (or on the Internet by way of this computer). I have a number of good friends I've known for as long as 20 years who just don't get it. In fact, I get the distinct impression that some of them have sincere concerns about my men

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

My great-grandmother had a plaque in her kitchen with that quote on it. My mother preferred “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” (Clearly that didn’t stick.)

I’d like to update Mom’s aphorism for the 21st century: “If you don’t have anything at all to say, join a social network.”

For those of you living under rocks, MySpace is a social network. But the hottest one these days is called Facebook. An appropriate name, as it turns out, since it’s a forum for the most superficial kind of human interaction possible. (The name actually comes from a student directory published for Harvard freshman.)

These networks allow you to make public your tastes in music, pizza toppings and toilet paper color. You can embed video clips and upload pictures of yourself gone wild at Spring Break. You can add extras (Facebook applications) that allow you to do things like take polls about which of your Facebook friends is most likely to move to Tibet and become a monk. Fascinating. People are supposed to extrapolate from the mishmash of inanities you share about yourself that you’re hip, you’re edgy, and then to conclude that they want to know you. I think.

Social networking is shallow, narcissistic and apparently addictive. (I know what you’re thinking. At least blogging isn’t—necessarily—shallow.) It’s the online version of waving to yourself when you see your face on a TV screen in the electronics section. It reminds me of the Playboy centerfold’s turn-ons and pet peeves, the Stay cool!s scribbled in high-school yearbooks, the “Friends Test” 14-year-olds are passing around by e-mail these days, with questions like “Croutons or Bacon Bits” and “What color is your bedroom carpet?”.

(Croutons and dirty. Do you feel like you know me now?)

Then there’s the signal-to-noise ratio. What do people expect to get from these things when there are 80 million of them embedding the same YouTube videos and uploading pictures of themselves getting their [insert body part here] pierced? How do they even tell each other apart?

One college kid looking for love narrowed his options by searching Facebook for women named Grace, just because he liked the name. That got him a manageable applicant pool and he found a candidate who met his requirements. That’s one way of dealing with it, I guess. Love in the time of the keyword search…

But apparently it’s the next big thing. There are kazillions of dollars of venture capital being poured into social networks right now, undoubtedly because corporations are drooling over the opportunity to learn what makes their favorite demographic tick so they can market more crap to them.

I know, I sound like an old fart. But I’m not, really. Well, maybe I am, but it’s irrelevant. The truth is, being the geekette and optimist that I am, I’m convinced social networks don’t all have to be virtual frat parties slash pole dances… The medium will ripen, hopefully, into something that is much more interesting…

I really do want to know this: If you could design the perfect social network for people like us, what would it be like?

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. Abraham Lincoln My great-grandmother had a plaque in her kitchen with that quote on it. My mother preferred "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all." (Clearly that didn't stick.) I'd like to update Mom's aphorism for the 21st century: "If you don't have anything at all to say, join a social network." For those of you living under rocks, MySpace is a social network. But the hottest one these days is called Facebook. An appropriate name, as it turns out, since it's a forum for the most superficial kind of human interaction possible. (The name actually comes from a student directory published for Harvard freshman.) These networks allow you to make public your tastes in music, pizza toppings and toilet paper color. You can embed video clips and upload pictures of yourself gone wild at Spring Break. You can add extras (Facebook applications) that allow you to do things like take polls

Translation can be a very entertaining business. I was once asked to “clean up” a text that had been machine translated (that means computer translated for those of you not in the biz.) from French into English. It was an RFP for upgrades to a coal-fired power plant in Morocco. (How entertaining could that possibly be? You’d be surprised.)

The company I was working for only had a hard copy of the original document so, before they could run it through the translation software, they had to run it through OCR (optical character recognition) software. Basically, you scan a doc and OCR software recognizes the shapes of the letters, punctuation, etc. and saves the file as editable text rather than an image file.

That’s always fun. In the case of my project, the OCR software often read the letters “ril” as “n” so, for example, “risques et périls” (a stock liability-related term in French) came out as “risques et pénis.”

Then, when they ran the OCR gobbledygook through translation software, this is the kind of thing they got (which I had to clean up):

• it will not be tolerated that provisional constructions drink some such as cloakrooms.
• The CONTRACTOR ensures in particular his expenses, risks and penis, transport and all the operations being attached to it (handling, storing, etc…).
• Le-CONTRACTANT will have to make its deal of the telephone food of its building site.
• The CONTRACTOR is held to make the desired provisions so that a doctor can quickly arrive on the spot and that the broken workmen can be evacuated quickly. He will possibly have an ambulance.

Hunnnndreds of pages of this stuff. And they wanted me to spend no more than 20 minutes on each page. If only people had a clue. Sigh.

I was inspired to write this because of a post on TechBee’s blog about a book on funny translations. The book has a section on priceless bad translations, like this one, which was originally in French:

Competitors will defile themselves on the promenade at 11am and each car will have two drivers who will relieve themselves at each other’s convenience.

Those French are such libertines! Shocking!

Clearly a translation job in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing. I mean, an entire big, bad religion is based on a less-than-immaculate translation. Too bad humanity can’t prosecute that translator for the damage he did…

I don’t think human translators are an endangered species quite yet. But I bet Vincent wishes some computer could take over for him right about now. As I write this, he’s busy translating 75 thousand words of this into French:

The polymer mechanical property data is not specified. Residual stress and shrinkage and warpage analyses require the polymer mechanical property data to be specified. Check the material data, define all the relevant mechanical property data, then re-run the analysis. For isotropic materials, define the elastic modulus (E) and Poissons ratio (v). For transversely isotropic materials, define E1, E2, v12, v23, and G. For other supported viscoelastic models, define constants.

You gotta be a special kind of crazy to take a job like that.

If you’re a language geek and you want to have some fun with machine translation, go to Babelfish. Paste some text into the window and translate it. The more unusual the original text, the better. The result might be mildly funny. But it gets really good when you take the resulting translation and translate it back into its original language. Do you recognize this song?

In the city where I was born, lived a man who sailed with the sea, and it told us his life, in the ground of the submarines, Ainsi we sailed until with the sun, until so that we found a sea of green, and we lived under the waves, in our yellow submarine, We all live in a submarine yellow, underwater yellow, underwater yellow, us that all live in a submarine yellow, underwater yellow, underwater yellow, And our friends are all on board, much more them next door of phase, and the band starts to play.

I actually kind of like the abstract, poetically incorrect result…

I worked briefly on dictionary development for Systran (the company that created the MT software used by Babel Fish), on the Alta Vista/Babel Fish project before it was launched. So if you play with it, some of the words that come up might actually have been entered into the dictionary by my very fingers!

More on how Systran’s MT software works for you über geeks. And check out Roger’s blog on all things linguistic!

Translation can be a very entertaining business. I was once asked to "clean up" a text that had been machine translated (that means computer translated for those of you not in the biz.) from French into English. It was an RFP for upgrades to a coal-fired power plant in Morocco. (How entertaining could that possibly be? You'd be surprised.) The company I was working for only had a hard copy of the original document so, before they could run it through the translation software, they had to run it through OCR (optical character recognition) software. Basically, you scan a doc and OCR software recognizes the shapes of the letters, punctuation, etc. and saves the file as editable text rather than an image file. That's always fun. In the case of my project, the OCR software often read the letters "ril" as "n" so, for example, "risques et périls" (a stock liability-related term in French) came out as "risques et pénis." Then, when they ran the OCR gobbledygook through translation software, this is the