Two training courses in two weeks: Well done to my colleague Mark Buffery, who has completed our Accelerated Introduction to Unstructured FrameMaker course this week. This is a course devised by the excellent trainers at Scriptorium, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a quick intro to FrameMaker. The ideal solution is to go on their classroom course in North Carolina, but this course is also available as a webinar, or you can simply buy the course book and work through it.

Mark joined us as a Translation Coordinator in June 2006. He already has an MSc in Translation Studies, and five years' experience working at two other reputable translation companies. But some of the stuff that we do at Salford Translations Ltd is new for Mark, and we are investing some time, energy and money in giving him appropriate training.

Meantime, the building work on the top floor is coming on apace, and I should be able to move back into my office when I return from the DITA Europe conference next week.

The North West Translators' Network (NWTN) have kindly invited me back to speak to them again about marketing issues on 13th December at the Manchester YHA. I did a presentation on marketing for the NWTN about 18 months ago, and it was a lot of fun. I look forward to another evening of interesting discussion on 13 December!

It has been a busy week on the professional development front.

I was away on a one-week course to qualify as a Certified Trainer for a leading Translation Memory tool (more news on this soon). My thanks to Tracey and her team for the warm welcome, and for a very professional course.

Meantime, two of my colleagues at Salford Translations Ltd took an online course in "XML and Structured Authoring", organised by the excellent trainers at Scriptorium. For details see http://www.scriptorium.com/training/class_xml.html. I took this course as a classroom-based two-day training course back in 2003, so it was interesting to see how it has now been adapted for Webinar delivery. Both Cathy and Mark found the course enjoyable, and both felt they benefitted from the course. Many thanks to Sarah O'Keefe and her team at Scriptorium, a world-class training company for FrameMaker training and XML stuff (and authors of the occasional books on FrameMaker, technical authoring and the like).

And I managed to set a new record; bad enough to experience a motorway closure in one direction on my journey. But the M6 was closed again on my way back as well, so I got a full set this time.

I have been banned from my own office! For the next two weeks, we are having work done on our offices, and we have had to completely empty the floor where my office is. For these two weeks, I will work like a nomad, parking my laptop wherever I find a friendly desk.