Janice Campbell's Weblog: Localization & Netbeans

I should be so lucky to have such a rich "social life". Instead, I feel overloaded and overwhelmed. First, with the social networking I need to keep up with for my job. I mean, I *am* on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, NotchUp, StumbleUpon, Ryze, mynetbeans.org. I blog; I wiki; I IM; I Gtalk; I Flickr, Frappr, and Picasa. I've tried and discarded meebo and GAIM (aka Pidgin). (Don't tell anyone, but I've also tried meetup.com, bayarealinkup, PlentyOfFish and YahooPersonals.)

I spend way too much time (personal, of course) on YouTube or netbeans.tv, or buying/selling junk I don't need on Amazon, ebay, and craigslist. I live on wikipedia and IMDB (I don't care if they are reliable sources of info or not). I subscribe to freecycle, a number of "keep in touch" career and job lists, and open source mailing lists. I've been known to even lurk around on classmates.com (oops, my ex found his new wife there).

I already feel ubiquitous.

But I don't Twitter, ICQ, IRC, or Skype. I'm not on MySpace or Orkut. (BTW, all the fun Brazilians are on the latter, so I am joining today!) No digg or del.icio.us for me. No time or money for gaming (whether play games or betting). Not even Second Life, where Sun has a pavilion.

Frankly, no one would consider me with it.

How can I keep up? Every day I get an invitation to join a new social networking tool, application, service. Recent invitations are for: Shelfari, iZimundi, Spock, ServiceBuzz, and Hoverspot.

Please, someone, tell me how to spend my time in an effective way in the social vertigo spinning out of control around me.

Secondly, I can't even keep up with the Sun apps and tools that drive the social network or are a player in them. In fact, some things I am just finding out about this week. Here are Sun "things" I didn't know about, even though they sit prominently on the sun.com home page:

• forums.sun.com
  
• wikis.sun.com.
  

Today I took a mini class in blogging. Tonight it's a conference call on how to work with communities.
That first question on the Sun wikis home sums it up for me: "Where do I start?". Or maybe I should ask: "Where do I end?"

For the last five years, I've been talking classes in horticulture, landscape design, and construction at Foothill College. As a part of the program, I do volunteer work of different sorts. Today, I returned to C.A.R. after a long absence. It was therapeutic for me to work in the garden with a group of developmentally disabled adults.

My name is Soup, or Ketchup...

Working in a globalization business unit in a global company with global community, partners, suppliers, and customers, it's hard to know how to spell or pronounce many of the international names we come across. My name is no exception.

"Campbell" is a common surname in English-speaking countries, but when I have to give it verbally to someone, it can sound like "Kimble", "Camel", "Kemple", or any other number of phonetically-similar surnames. My usual reply when asked is "Campbell, like the soup." Most people recognize the association right away. When I lived in Venezuela, "Kam-bel, como la sopa" got instant recognition as it was a popular brand there at the time. But, when living in Brussels, I got "No, not like the soup, but like the Scotch Ale", which was a much more recognizable (and tasty) brand there.

A Russian friend of mine, who lived in Venezuela, could not associate my name with any branding at all. It seemed illogical to her and any similar food product would do. From that moment on, my name was "Ketchup". It was a packaged food, red like tomato soup, and with a commonly recognized surname like Heinz. I didn't quite understand her logic, but came to grow fond of her addressing me as "Hey, Ketchup, how was work today? Want to go for a coffee?" It's many years later; neither one of us lives in Venezuela, but in her emails, she still addresses me as "ketchup."

While in Venezuela, my name morphed into a "Carmen Yánez" in one situation. I often called a friend of mine at his office, and had to go through the receptionist-operator. Our conversation went something like this (translated to English):

ME: "Hi, may I please speak to Mr. Leon?"
OPERATOR: "May I tell him who is calling?"
ME: (in my best Hispanicized pronunciation of my name) "Sí, la Señora Yanez Kahmbel."
OPERATOR: "What? La Señora Yánez?"
ME: "No, La Señora Kahmbel, como la sopa."
OPERATOR: "What about the soup? What's your name? Mrs. Carmen?"
ME: "No, my name is KAMP-BELL, like the SOUP! Don't you know?"
OPERATOR: "Just tell me your name so I can understand it, Sra. Yánez! I'll connect you now."

Back and forth we went for at least 15 minutes each time I called until I WAS FORCED to concede that my name was indeed Mrs. Carmen (popular name in Spanish-speaking countries) Yánez (a popular surname in Venezuela).

Today I am blogging on the Globalization group blog page.