See you soon

Sometimes when people close their shop or business for vacation, they put up a sign like this. It might mean that they have really gone fishing, but it's also come to mean that the person will be gone for a while but is coming back.

I'll be back in Barcelona on July 4th.

There may be some fish involved in my travels, although I probably won't be catching them myself...

If you've contributed a guest post, I'll be in touch with you about when it will appear.

Have a great few weeks and thanks for everything!

Yuki's mouse

One of my favorite students has two cats and they have a lot of mice. I've never met these cats but I feel close to them in any case. These cats are possessive of their mice, and their balls and other toys, and they like to hide them around the house. Do they ever find them again? Maybe not. But they know they're there somehow.

The possessive is almost always made this way: Yuki's mouse. We don't say the mouse of Yuki. People would understand us, but it wouldn't be the best way. We say, David's blog. My sister's house. My daughter's shoes. My best friend's wedding.

The plural of mouse is mice. I don't know why. Yuki's mice are hidden in many places. In this way she can always have another one, Yuki's new mouse...

I look forward to seeing you soon

Look forward to is a phrasal verb which means to anticipate something with pleasure. If you think about it, the sense here is of looking ahead, at something in the future.
The use of it in the title is a typical way to close a business email, similar to "I look forward to hearing from you." We use this in business all the time, and it's a good one to have ready when you're writing emails.
But we also look forward to things like holidays, celebrations, times with friends and family, romantic moments. We look forward to seeing people we haven't seen for a while.
The idea is that when we think of the thing which is going to happen, we feel happy.
We can also use the negative, as in "I have a dentist appointment and I'm not looking forward to it!"
Living in the present is great! But it's nice to look forward to things too.
So, what are you looking forward to?

I Wish I Worked There

Here's a new book that caught my attention. I'm not sure how great it would really be to work for Bloomberg or Nike, but it would be fun to see their facilities and get ideas. Here's an excerpt from the press release about the book:

Imagine you worked for a company that had slides instead of stairs, a medieval maze to stroll through during your private mediation, or perhaps an airline bed to sit on whilst brainstorming ideas with your colleagues …
I Wish I Worked There! reveals some of the world’s most inspiring and innovative places to work and shows the reader what it might be like to actually work there.
This new book goes behind the scenes of 20 famous brands, such as Lego, Urban Outfitters and Virgin, who place innovation and creativity at the heart of their working culture...

For more information, you can visit http://www.iwishiworkedthere.com/


Thanks to http://www.dezeen.com for the image and text!

Check out Posterous

You probably know about this already, but if you do, you haven't told me, so I'm just finding out about it. It's Posterous, a wonderfully simple and minimalistic posting platform which you can find at http://www.posterous.com/. Here's a little copy from their "about" page:

Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email. We launched in July 2008 and we've been steadily growing and adding features.
We love sharing thoughts, photos, audio, and files with our friends and family, but we didn't like how hard it was... so we made a better way.
That's posterous. We're super excited to see what happens when blogging becomes as easy as email, and we hope you enjoy posterous as much as we do. Thanks for trying it.

The feature they're promoting here is the ability to email posts to your Posterous site, but you can also just use the online posting function, which is like a blog but a bit simpler in terms of steps. Also, photos look fantastic here! For me the lack of advertising is another plus; as much as I admire targeted online marketing, sometime it makes me just a little bit t-i-r-e-d.

P.S. If you're a reader of Presentation Zen, you might be interested in Garr Reynolds' Posterous site, where he puts a lot of great pictures. You can find it at http://www.garr.posterous.com/

Here's a photo of his of the Oregon coast.

The beauty and functionality of the iPad

Wow!

I got to see one for the first time today and I was really impressed. One of the best features in terms of English is the ability to scroll over a word and get the definition; this is elegant and absolutely useful. Also, flipping the pages of the digital book is fantastic. Finally, the display provides a great mobile theater for video with the sense of a large screen. Step one, check bank balance. Step two, run to Apple store!

Below I've posted Apple's video presentation of the iPad.

Apple iPad Demo