What is a Shibboleth?

Shibboleth from wikipedia
It's an in-joke, a password, a key word, or a shared memory.

Japan's ESL company NOVA goes bankrupt

Nova files for bankruptcy with debt of ¥43.9 billion



If you're thinking about going to teach English in Japan, don't even think about working for Nova anymore. I worked for them for a year and a half, in Osaka and Tokyo, and had a great experience. Unfortunately for Nova's customers and employees, the company's hardball techniques have caught up with them.

Thanks to my man in Japan, EvenMe for the link.

Annoying business jargon that won't die

Get It In Writing: Copywriting - Business Jargon
It's shocking how many words are on this list that I've only ever heard in the workplace, normally by people that are trying to impress everyone. What's even more amazing is that I've heard people using over 90% of these words.Whomever put this list together, they certainly leveraged their human capital and hammered out this scalable list, instead of just going after the low-hanging fruit. I could blather on, and try to use more of these words to describe it, but I won't. It's how many there are.

Alternately, this list could be valuable for ESL teachers/ students that wanted to cover more "Business English" vocabulary on the cheap.

Enough cyberslacking, already! Get back to work!!!

Today's Link source: Reddit

read more digg story

The Best 11 Places for Free Audio Books On The Internets

Load up your iPod with these great sites to download free audio books. Most of these are from older works, and are done under the Creative Commons license.

1. LibriVox
Open source comes to audio books, as public domain books are read by contributors from the public. There is a large selection of works here, but audio quality can vary. If you can't find what you're looking for, why don't you record your own version and upload it?
LibriVox also features a podcast.

2. ThoughtAudio.com
Has a smaller selection, but they feature classics from Kafka, Shakespeare, The Bible, Plato, Mark Twain, Ghandi and more.

3. Free Christian AudioBooks
A selection of classic books about Christianity from authors, such as: Brother Lawrence, G. K. Chesterton, and Charles Spurgeon.

4. Naropa Poetics Audio Archives
Features lectures and poetry readings by some of the greats, including William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and is hosted by archive.org.

5. AudioBooksForFree.com
Has lots of books that are browseable by genre and read by voice actors. Genres include mystery, comedy, classics, science fiction and children's books.

6. Open Culture: Audio Book Podcast Collection
Links to lots of famous books that are available as podcasts through itunes.

7. Free Classic AudioBooks
The Classics as read by humans and computers, and available as mp3 or m4bs for ipod.

8. Podiobooks.com
Free serialized audio books available as podcasts. Lots of modern, but lesser-known books in a wide range of genres.

9. LoudLit.org
Collection of Classics, short stories, poetry and children's books. The cool thing is that some of the books have text that you can read on your ipod while you are listening.

10. Gutenberg: The Audio Books Project
Large collection of public domain literature, available in human- and computer-read formats. Good source of foreign language books.

11. Audio Poetry
This site has well known poems read by poetry fans, and is hosted by archive.org.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut.

Know any other good sites? Include them in the comments!

Free online translation tool

Babelfish

Sometimes, there are webpages and emails in other languages that would like to read in English. Sometimes, I'd like to translate something into a different language. Babelfish is the best way to resolve these translation issues, without actually talking to another, you know, person. You can translate web sites or blocks of text.

Warning: sometimes the Babelfish translations can be unnatural or garbled. This can really be a barrel of laughs if you do repeated translations with the same text.

"Linkjockey - big verbindingsplaats!!! quotidien the Linkjockey connections of placement Web with cold, has the interesting placements you before parakoloycime'nos." Yeah, man! Totally big verbindingsplaats!!!