Category: Ramblings

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay

It was a lazy Sunday yesterday, and we decided to take a short trip to the Honmoku Fishing Pier, just a few minutes by bus from our place, walkable with a bit of effort, but I didn’t have that bit in me yesterday.

We weren’t going to fish. I haven’t been fishing since I was about 16, and all of my fishing trips were on fishing boats in the Long Island Sound or off the South shore of Long Island with my dad. I have never fished from a pier.

The fishing pier was packed, including couples out on a fishing date, so to speak, and parents with children. We spent about two hours watching people catch fish of various sizes, mostly disappointingly small and probably requiring their release.

While we were relaxing watching other people fish, we got to see a number of largish cargo ships pass to the East from Yokohama. None were close enough to be identified, but technology came to the rescue, in the form of the Vessel Finder website.

This website provides a map with all ships with the required equipment turned on. Ships involved in arms shipments to and fuel shipments from a certain aggressor state apparently switch off that equipment. But I digress.

One of the ships was the Oberon, a vehicle carrier headed to Kobe (as indicated by the VF website).

The availability of this information on ships reminds me of the time some years ago when I was left with not much to do on an interpreting assignment in Evansville, Indiana. The witness in a patent case I was supposed to be interpreting for was never called, and I spent a week there with not much to do (during the daytime, anyway) but look out my hotel window at the barges moving slowly up and down the Ohio River, on which the hotel was situated.

I was fully paid for all days, and, while I was cooling my heels in my hotel room waiting for the call that never came, I discovered a service similar to VF that indicated the departure times, destinations and arrival times of barges carrying exciting things like coal up and down the Ohio River. Such is the exciting life of a litigation interpreter. But I digress.

Carcinogen Ads Promoted by Microsoft’s LinkedIn

[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Microsoft’s LinkedIn sends me ads for Japan Tobacco. I am attempting to stop them, but don’t know if it will work. Japan Tobacco sells carcinogens.

While Meta is totally criminal and partners with criminals on its several platforms, I never got a Japan Tobacco ad on Facebook when I was a user of that criminal platform.

Partnering with JT is simply sleazy and doesn’t reflect well on Microsoft.

JT cannot advertise on broadcast media, and I suppose it is using what it can get, which is a complicit company like Microsoft.

Seeing this kind of literally toxic garbage thrown at me gives me new encouragement to post just anything I want to LinkedIn. Screw Microsoft’s cover story of LinkedIn being a business networking platform. It’s nothing of the sort.

I’ll need to see if telling Microsoft that the JT ads are “annoying or not interesting” works. If not, something else might be in the works from here in Curmudgeonville.

受注してなんぼ

I am excited and thrilled to announce that I’m neither excited nor thrilled to see Microsoft go the way of all social media cesspools, every day approaching closer and closer to Zuckerberg’s platforms.

TikTok-like videos, plantation investment scams, and more.

And, of course, there are the LinkedIn coaches who will teach you how to achieve “success on LinkedIn”. WTF does that mean? Nothing, actually, but the engagement-harvesting addicted LinkedIn believers who try to game the algorithm to get more impressions, followers, and connections apparently haven’t figured that out.

It’s meaningless, folks. In fact, never was more than an illusion of relevance.

As someone in Osaka might put it, 受注してなんぼ.

Sluggish Microsoft AI?

It took Microsoft almost 30 minutes recently to start shadow-banning a post I made on its LinkedIn platform, reporting what is happening in the war in Europe, coupled with a common-sense suggestion of what needs to be done (essential, to achieve a solution to the Russian problem, in form of a decisive defeat of Russia and removal of their ability to continue their aggression).

I suppose the shadow-banning is understandable, since Microsoft continues to promote the fantasy that its LinkedIn platform is a useful business platform, rather than what it actually is, just another social media platform, created and operated for the same purpose as other social media platforms.

A company of the stature of Microsoft, however, should speed up its AI-driven shadow-banning so as to more effectively prevent this kind of unpleasant content about the real world from reaching its founder and creator users, who might not be excited, thrilled, or honored to see such stuff.

They might be more interested in turning the page to embark on a new chapter, continuing to elevate their journey and, on the way, opening doors that lead to exciting places in the LinkedIn Phony Kingdom.

I wonder if Microsoft’s AI would have been able to figure out the sarcasm in the above paragraph. Perhaps, but it is irrelevant; Microsoft is basically the same as operators of other social media platforms.

Sorry, my business card is only in Japanese.

One day long ago, when I was the President of the Japan Association of Translators, I attended an event held by the Japan Translation Federation, a group that is for all intents and purposes operated by translation agencies in Japan.

It was mostly a socializing event. The JTF is under the aegis of a Japanese governmental ministry and I was introduced as the head of JAT to a person from that ministry. We exchanged business cards, the side of the mine shown to this person being in Japanese and indicating clearly my position in JAT—a group of translators, rather than translation agencies—and my profession as a translator.

His reaction—after receiving and looking at my business card—was to hand me his card, saying “Please excuse me, my card is only in Japanese.”

This guy was just told I was the head of a translators’ organization in Japan, I was speaking Japanese, and handed him a business card that said the same about me.

At first, I thought to make a quip about this stupidity, then discarded the idea, but ultimately did tell him that “When you are a Japanese-to-English translator, reading Japanese is part of the job. I suspect he didn’t catch the sarcasm.

I wonder whether things have changed much. Many Japanese have been conditioned by trained-bear foreigners on TV here speaking Japanese of a variety, some quite well, but a foreigner translating or even reading Japanese could still be an oddity to some Japanese. Some surely some cling to the belief that Japan and the language spoken by Japanese is so unique it cannot be mastered without having Japanese DNA. Bless their hearts.