(Almost) Wordless Wednesday November 23, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.3 comments
I’ve been translating a lot of handwritten doctor notes lately.
Change your Skype password November 10, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Tech tips.2 comments
I flew home from the ATA Conference on Monday and landed at 11:20 PM. Once I arrived at home I unpacked, put my suitcases away, showered and face-planted into bed. I woke up the next morning to 16 messages on Skype and a missed call in Skype and on my cell phone. I had been hacked, and all of my contacts were sent a link to a “baidu.com.” Luckily most of my contacts are savvy enough not to click on a link from me without any introductory text (hence the 16 messages asking if it was legit from me), but I had to go to https://web.skype.com to manually delete the message for every contact. Needless to say it was a pain.
My friend and colleague Roland Grefer was the one who had been trying to call me. In addition to being a great translator he is also a very competent IT support guy. He did a little research and discovered the following:
From what I’ve found, about a month ago, Microsoft started to merge their Live/Hotmail/Outlook/MSN/Xbox account systems into a new “Universality” account management system.
However, in the process, even if your Skype account was already linked to one of the above email accounts, they left Skype also accessible via the old Skype user name and password combination.
If the password for either account was one that was compromised in any of the recent hacks, the Bad Guys (TM) were then able to use the respective account to gain access to Skype and send spam etc. from the affected user’s Skype account.
But since M$ hadn’t made users aware of the parallel existence of the “new” and “old” Skype user name and password combos, they weren’t even aware of this “feature” as the culprit.
Once they logged into their account, and checked their “Activity” at
https://account.live.com/Activity
virtually all of them found successful logins from Asia or South America around the time the incident happened.
A sad state of affairs,
Roland
So change your Skype password or you too will be spamming your Skype contacts. And thanks to Roland for researching this!
(Almost) Wordless Wednesday mea culpa November 4, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings.2 comments
Next time someone please tell me when the queue stops posting! Not one of you said anything. LOL. I can’t believe I went almost a month without noticing. I thought for sure I had scheduled out past the conference. I’m blaming preconference and real life stress. New posts now scheduled. Sorry!
Two rights make a wrong October 29, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff.add a comment
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.
“In English,” he explained, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.”
“However,” the professor continued, “there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room piped up. “Yeah, right.”
TGIF: 7 Movie Jokes You Missed If You Only Speak English October 14, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff, TGIF.add a comment
Tips for the upcoming ATA conference October 7, 2016
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA.add a comment
It’s now less than a month until the ATA Annual Conference in San Francisco. I just wanted to share some administrative tips for those of you who may not be active on the listservs and might have missed it.
- Be sure to download the conference app and if nothing else please use it to submit session and conference evaluations. This will save ATA money and will ensure that the conference fee, which is now designed to break-even instead of lose money, will remain as low as it can possibly be.
- Bring your own tote or messenger bag to the conference. ATA decided last year to do away with them, since most people threw them out and, most recently, recycled them at the end of the conference. There will be an ATA messenger bag to purchase at the ATAWare table, but they sold out very quickly last year. So either bring your own bag or buy the messenger bag as soon as you check in.
- If you are planning on attending the Job Fair this year be sure to bring some printed resumes with you to hand to the companies there. The companies will have signs indicating exactly what they are looking for, so you won’t need 30. Maybe print out 10 just in case. Better to have too many than too few.
- Be sure to order and bring your business cards. I’ve been buying mine from Vista Print, but there are lots of affordable options. Just be sure to splurge a little and get one that doesn’t have an ad for the printing company.
- We will be in the Financial District again. This is close to the Embarcadero Center and the Ferry Building with its many restaurants and artisan food market as well as within walking distance of Chinatown and my favorite restaurant, The Tadich Grill (I highly recommend the cioppino). If you want to eat at the Slanted Door, which is also fairly close (1 Ferry Building #3), I recommend getting a reservation.
- For those of you who will still be there on Sunday, Jose, Joe and I are getting a group together for dim sum. Please let me know ahead of time if you’d like to join us so I can make the reservation. Dim sum is best enjoyed with a group.
Musings from an overworked translator 