Nine months ago, I had asked “Where are the blogs of computational linguists?” Now, there is an answer. The Association for Computational Linguistics has moved its documents (formerly ACL Universe) into the Wiki and there is now a separate page for blogs. It has all of the blogs I found so far and more. It even has my blog in it. Must be scraping the bottom of the barrel 🙂 .

I got suckered again. Steve Kaufmann - founder of thelinguist.com has been asked by a learner who is also studying to be a second language teacher about the concepts of interlanguage and fossilization. Given that Steve does not hold much respect for educational theories, I thought it would be interesting to see him stretched a bit on the concepts that he must have observed first hands multiple times. My mistake. But I did spend time thinking about it, so I might as well put it down.

Synthravels (via Springwise) is a barely nascent company that offers a travel guide experience in virtual world. You pick which virtual world you want to go to and what kind of things you want to see and they will find you a guide. Last time I visited the Second Life newbie ground, there was a number of people saying so, what do I actually do here, even though there were Welcome cards right in front of their avatars.

I needed to convert multiple MSWord documents into the OpenOffice.org format and then later to convert those documents further into HTML. How to do it with a single document is obvious; it took some searching to figure out how to do it for multiple documents. The magic menu turned out to be File/Wizards (Document Converter and Web Page correspondingly). In a retrospect, it is not unobvious. The only reason it took time is because I very rarely use wizard interfaces of any software.

I was listening to the Trying to Learn Spanish podcast and in its 11th episode somebody mentioned an interesting e-book (Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor) that has parallel English and Spanish text and allows to quickly switch between them. I like the idea of bilingual books, so I went hunting for it. The book is available for purchase in a couple of places, but I wanted to see an excerpt first to see the quality and ease of use.