Google has won me over with its translator!

I dislike liking something that I haven’t read. So when I’m camping out in a blog where there are lots of long posts that I want to read, I’ll often read them all first and then go back through real quickly and like all of them.

The reading problem is exacerbated when the blog is in a foreign language. I’m not good at foreign languages.

In fact, at Henrietta M. King High School in Kingsville, Texas (see map at right), I made my only two non-A’s in Spanish; my high school required that we take two semesters of a foreign language.

At Texas A&M University, my major required me to take two semesters of computer science, another foreign language. I made two C’s…. barely. In the second semester I had an F going into the final. This was back in the card punch days. My final exam was to write a program in COBOL that would spit out the initial of my last name. I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — 72 hours — in the Computer Science Center trying…. no luck. On Monday morning at 7:00 a.m. for an 8:00 a.m. class, I simply sat down and used comment cards to create the initial. I knew I was going to get an F, but I had fun.

When I went to see my grade, there was a note next to my name: “See Professor.” Ooopsie.

I went to see the Professor only to find that I had an A on the final and a C in the course! Yahooooooooooooo! He said that comment cards weren’t programming but he liked my ingenuity since no one had ever done that before. Reminds me of the Star Trek movie (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and 2009’s Star Trek) where Captain Kirk defeats the Kobayashi Maru test by re-programming it.

This all brings me back to those foreign-language posts. I just discovered the Google Translator. It’s awesome! And fast! Just go to translate.google.com and enter the URL of the blog post you want to translate and — voilà! — just seconds later you’re reading in English…. or any other language!

I feel like an emperor!

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