Multilanguage Tech?

I'm in Miami for the Winter Break, and chanced into conversation with a family that speaks Spanish and minimal English.

While trying to explain what I'm studying and what I'd like to do with myself after college, I had a lot of trouble finding the right words to describe what I do. I ended up using Spanglish, examples and sign language to make myself clear.

I'm fluent in Spanish, but I don't have the vocabulary for many of the things I do. How do I describe the intricacies of the Web, how I bought a domain and wrote my own Web site, blogging, and such in another language? I understand these things so easily in English, but I don't know how to translate them.

RSS aggregate and search

Fredi Bach made a really cool RSS feed aggregator.

"Well, basically this is a feed aggregator. That means it takes the headlines from other sites, mostly blogs and archives them into a database to make them easily searchable even if the original feed was updated. Additionally to those “normal” features it shares with other good feed aggregators, jMe let's you select feed items and arrange them in a collection. This collection can than be posted to other websites, weblogs or message boards."

The tool includes some pretty advanced search techniques, and the collected feeds include posts on OS X, Web 2.0 & programming.

What an interesting way to collect and then find information!

Video Killed the Radio Star

and maybe print news?

For my semester project in Communications on the Internet, we were encouraged to make use of multimedia on our Web sites. Professor Carlson encouraged us to scour YouTube for relevant videos, provided that including them would not be an infringement of copyright.

Guess what? YouTube ain't the only thing out there.

Video Jug's upload system looks as easy as YouTube's, with superior quality. The site's focus is on creating "how to" videos, their tagline is "Life Explained On Film."

Toufee is an online video editor which turns your videos into flash presentations. You don't even have to know what flash is to get this running.

Spresent helps you create flash presentations right in your browser, using built-in or custom animation. They have a library of clip art and you can also use your own pictures.

Just more examples of how the Internet dissolves barriers to entrance into the worlds of professionals. These amateur-friendly sites may not produce the next great filmmaker or flash artist. Or they might. It just has to be "good enough," right?

Adventure #78935

::shakes fist at Microsoft::

Ever since I got my computer running again, Windows crashes every time I try to play a song or a video. Granted, I'm only really using this partition to run Dreamweaver, but coding without tunes? Not gonna happen.

So I get a hold of the motherboard cd, and reinstall the correct drivers. Aha! Now the music flows.

Pop-up window: "Since installing Windows, you've made serious changes to the hardware. Please re-activate Windows."

::shrug:: *Why does re-installing drivers make my Windows activation invalid?*

::click:: "This cd key has expired. Please enter a new key."

Huh? Come on now, I'm one of the few computer savvys I know who actually uses a legal version of Windows. And I'm punished for it because it took me a while to find a working driver?
This is ridiculous.

An Adventure!

I mentioned that the hard drive in my desktop computer had died. For two weeks I ran it off the Ubuntu Live CD while I waiting for a new hard drive to come in. I gasped in awe of the 250 GB I got for $75. Yay, Newegg.
So today, the hard drive came in. While I was putzing around, I played with my laptop for a bit, which has also not been working. Through a magical combination of random keys that I hit in frustration, the thing came to life. Since I don't remember what I did, I won't be restarting it for a while.
Then to the desktop. I realize I don't have the right power cord, call a friend, it's on it's way. Said friend takes over my feeble attempts to do things myself and soon, I have my computer back: a beautiful dual-boot of Ubuntu and Windows.
Le sigh. Glee.