Category: Freelancing
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“Work from home” and “make a difference” “helping build better AI”!
Here’s but a smattering of the offers of “exciting opportunities” I’ve received over the past 15 months or so. This is what goes on behind the scenes of AI “learning.” AI models are being trained on the backs of low-paid piece-workers. Imagine, if US residents are being offered $8 an hour for query evaluation or…
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Eleven+ years
I think my photo needs updating. My first post, on February 20, 2011, was this: Jack of all trades Translation assignments run the gamut — generalists must become instant experts in the topic of the day. The irony is that beginning translators will take almost any job. On occasion, they will even quote on jobs without…
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Indemnity clauses: Covering your assets
A member of a translator discussion list I’m on posed the following question about contract language, and it inspired me to share a few freely available contract resources (and a few choice words)… Can anyone help me understand these warranty and indemnity clauses? They are part of a work-for-hire contract sent by a publisher for…
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It’s not that I’m not thinking of you in this holiday season…
I’ve always been a bit out of step. With the calendar.
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Doing is better than stewing
This is the danger of getting enough sleep — so many thoughts, so little time! What shall I do today? (Assuming I don’t shelve everything and watch baseball with my mom — Phillies currently losing to the Yankees in spring training.) I listened to Radiolab while eating breakfast (I’ll admit it, breakfast at 1 pm,…
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Hey! The ACA enrollment deadline is Friday!
That’s this Friday, December 15, 2017. In case anyone is still thinking we have until the end of December to enroll — we don’t! The deadline for enrolling in health insurance starting January 1, 2018 is this Friday, December 15. The website is healthcare.gov, and a good place to begin is https://www.healthcare.gov/contact-us/ — click on…
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To Your Health: ACA Marketplace Info for 2018 Enrollment
The enrollment period for getting health insurance for 2018 through healthcare.gov starts Nov. 1, but you can log on now to create or update your account!
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Belt, suspenders . . . and a few safety pins
This is a post about email. And fail-safes. And redundancies. And fail-safes. I’ll put the moral of this story right up front: A freelancer who uses email as the primary method of receiving and sending work messages and files needs at least one back-up email account and built-in redundancy. Because if you have just one…
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Checking in
Gosh, it’s been a while! Sympathetic visitors will interpret this as I’m so busy doing interesting things that I don’t have time to post. The rest will assume negligence of one type or another. Everyone is right to a certain extent. This is one of the freelancer’s dilemmas — even when we’re not working, we…
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The most precious resource
Time. Let’s run through this. 4 pm Thursday is “now”; 1 pm Friday is “deadline.” OK, so: I have 21 hours in which to edit a 10,000-or-so-word paper with 3 tables, 2 figures, 31 references, 24 endnotes — a 29-page document as currently formatted. I have already been through the references, figures, and tables once,…