Category Archives: life

…and a mint gimlet!

life,

We took a small road trip up to Bellingham to visit Sky and J’wyl and Zork. It was the furthest in a single go we had driven the new car. And it was the new car, so I has having fun.

Unfortunately the day out of the three-day weekend that made most sense with our schedule was one of the days that Zork had to work, so we visited him briefly at work (I have now been inside and actually shopped a wee bit at the Granola Mine), and then met him for dinner late in the evening.

We didn’t have an agenda other than visiting. We talked about lots of things, from The Skyman’s super sekrit project, to favorite shows on DVD, to gaming, to just random chatty things.

We had lunch at one of their fave restaurants, Bayou on Bay. The food was awesome, and they don’t skimp on the gin in their gimlet, let me tell you! I had a second cocktail as Sky had volunteered to drive back. Now he’s experienced some of the fun of the zippy new Outback.

Particularly after the conversation about the sekrit, I had been determined to get some writing done Monday.. Progress was made, though I did more napping than writing that day. Which isn’t exactly a bad way to spend a holiday.

Some of what I wrote will be posted somewhere soonish. Stay tuned!

Pop goes the culture

life, ,

In childhood most of your cultural experiences are dictated by your family. Particularly when I was a kid, when the typical family had, at most, one TV and one stereo music system. I was lucky enough to have parents who believed in reading and being cheap, so except in those towns we lived in that were too small to have a public library, most of my childhood involved near weekly trips to the local library.

For other things, we had church music, TV, my parents’ record collection, and radio. And most of the towns we lived in were so small there was only one local AM radio station. Which didn’t really matter, because our house, like most of our neighbors’ had the TV and stereo in the same room. So you watch/listened to what Mom or Dad wanted.

Continue reading Pop goes the culture →

Doin’ the cleanin’

life, ,

Few of us enjoy doing housework. No matter how necessary we tell ourselves it is, we’d all rather be doing something more fun or interesting.

Some of us aren’t very good at it. I don’t mean we’re not good at making ourselves do it, but that we don’t seem to be very efficient at it. For example, in the time it takes me to unload and reload a dishwasher, my husband can clean the stove, clean the table, hand wash most of the dirty dishes, and mop the floor. It’s like he has a superpower. He just moves so quickly.

On the other hand, afterward, neither of us can find half the dishes he put away. Continue reading Doin’ the cleanin’ →

New wheels

life

So, we bought a new car!

Our new car
Her name is Luna.

We have been thinking about replacing our car for a while. When we bought the Focus back in ’03, we said that we’d start looking for a new car when the extended warranty ran out. It did so in August of ’10.

Continue reading New wheels →

Identities

life, writing, ,

It has not been a fun weekend. Friday morning I was rudely shoved out of denial1 that I was sick. The sinus headache that woke me up before the alarm went off was so excruciating, I had to put an ice pack on my head2. I had a deadline, a document that needed to be in a draft suitable to email to a person responsible for training some customers by the end of the day. So I couldn’t take a sick day, I needed to work from home.

Many of my work projects can be handed off to colleagues in my department, but this one isn’t one of those. I started out in technical writing without formal training in the field. Oh, yes, I’d had lots of writing, communication, and journalism classes, as I kept changing majors. And I’d been actively writing (and studying writing) since I’d made the decision when I was six to be a writer34, but I was hired as employee number 6 in a small startup. Tech writing was only one of my duties, and I approached it by asking the question: if I had to use this, what would I want to know? Then I played with the software and the hardware until I knew everything5, and wrote it up.

When we started hiring people with prior experience in tech writing (as the company grew), I learned that many tech writers were very uncomfortable writing about hardware, for instance. And if they had their druthers, avoid understanding programming logic altogether. To be fair, in well designed consumer products, users should not have to understand programming to use the product. But many of the products I’ve supported over the years have been enterprise, server-side applications and the platforms and hardware they run on. My users are usually administrators and installers, not end-users.

The upshot of all this is, within every tech writing group/department6 I’ve been in, I’ve been the hardware guy. The person assigned to write installation guides and the other super-techie docs no one else wants to do. This product is one of those.

And we’re still in the process of changing our production tool. I and the other Principal Tech Writer are still configuring the new repository, stylesheets, and support tools while we’re working. And this particular deliverable type is not fully defined and developed. So I’m also having to work on that end at the same time. All with an insanely short delivery time.

In addition to being the hardware/operating system/programming guy, I’m also the fix things guy. If I had a dime for every time a co-worker has said, “If you can’t figure it out, I don’t know who could” when we’re talking about software misbehaving, I could retire to the Bahamas.

That’s really just another manifestation of my study-it-until-I-understand-the-inner-workings trait. While in an ideal world, a user shouldn’t need to understand programming logic to use a consumer software product, in the real world, understanding that logic can help. Particularly if you can also grok the fundamental paradigm of the product7, you can figure out how to make it do things the designers didn’t plan on, and you can diagnose problems they never anticipated.

Related to that, I’m always the one who figures out how to use new systems, implement them, stretch them to meet our needs, and so forth.

I like doing all of these things. I like explaining. I try to teach my co-workers how to do all the things I do. Tasks that they have to do frequently they learn. But there is always a lot of stuff that folks only vaguely remember I showed them. And the whole “think like a programmer” or “think like a troubleshooter” thing seems to be something you either have a knack for, or don’t.

Which means I’m always going to be “the only one who knows how to do that” guy.

And that’s not fun when you get so sick you have to cancel the monthly writers’ meeting and the game I run, but you still have to squeeze in work from home time to make the deadline.

Footnotes

1. These symptoms are just hay fever because we’ve had really high pollen counts

2. And took cold tablets and went back to sleep for a bit…

3. I asked Mom where books come from, and she found a great explanation of the publishing industry in some sort of kids’ encyclopedia during our next visit to the library, and I was hooked!

4. And I made my first fiction sale at the age of 16, so I was a pro long before I got into tech writing.

5. Relatively speaking. It also helped that my other duties included testing the software and hardware.

6. Although I worked at one company for over 20 years, over the course of that time I had 6 different supervisors, as the company grew, shifted direction, grew some more, shifted direction, was split in two, et cetera.

7. For instance, the paradigm of the now nearly-gone word processor, WordPerfect, was the typewriter and how a typist used it. Text and commands for formatting are processed linearly, much like a mechanical typewriter. The paradigm of MS Word, on the other hand is a mutated cascading stylesheet8.

8. Yes, I know Word has been around longer than CSS. Of course I do. I’ve been using Word (and supporting other people using Word) since before Microsoft released Windows. But that’s the paradigm9.

9. Mutated. Because while it gives the illusion of having taxonomic behavior, it also works as a reverse taxonomy, and occasionally as a non-Euclidean hierarchy. But that’s a story for another day.

I clutter, therefore I am

life, ,

The uncluttered don’t understand why clutter doesn’t drive the cluttered crazy. The truth is that it does. Trust me, we are as annoyed about it as the most obsessive-compulsive neat freak you can imagine. But there is a balance. Sometimes what looks like clutter to you is simply a spacial filing system. Things pile up on my desk precisely so they will be there when I need them, for instance.

Virtual clutter has been driving my craziest lately. I have too many podcasts. When too many unheard podcasts pile up on my iPhone and the free space drops too low, the phone starts misbehaving in small ways. Most of the symptoms are extremely minor—the wrong cover art is displayed while playing music, for instance. Some are a bit more annoying.

The obvious solution is to delete the old podcasts that I’m obviously never going to listen to. That takes time, and ca only be done, under the current software, at my computer. Until the annoying symptoms happen, my only indication I have of the impending problem happens when I synchronize the phone with the computer–which is almost always when I’m on my way out the door to catch a bus to work. In other words, when I’m rushing and short on time.

The next solution is to drastically reduce the number of podcasts I have my computer fetch for me. Obviously I’m not listening to a lot of them, right? Except I can’t predict in advance which ones I won’t get to. I listen to a small number of news podcasts each work morning on my way into work. I listen to the others very sporadically at work. I can only listen to talking people while doing illustration or design work, or if I’m working on some of e more design-ish or programming-ish tasks in the information architect side ofmy job. If I’m actually writing, editing, or reading specifications and such in prep for writing, I have to have music, not talking podcasts.

So some weeks I listen to no podcasts at all during work.

Then there are the times when I queue up a podcast, such as the most emailed stories on NPR, and the stories are things I just do not care to listen to. Or it’s a story I’ve already heard about or read about more than I need to know, so I go looking for another podcast to listen to, instead.

I’ll keep muddling along like this for a while longer, I’m sure. Yeah, I will probably explore some ofthe alternate systems that substitute streaming for downloading in advance, but I suspect the virtual clutter will manifest in new ways on the device.

At least there will always be tidying to keep me out of trouble, right?

Where the words go

life,

Two different days this week I wrote most of a post on my iPad during lunch. I got interrupted both times, and closed the app. I had expected the draft posts to be saved, but it appears the app doesn’t work that way. Which is an extremely poor design decision1.

But enough critiquing of other people’s software design decisions2.

Continue reading Where the words go →

On the shores of a blue C…

life, ,

Currently, Wednesday is my work-from-home day, so Wednesday is the day I give my hubby a ride to work, then pick him up at the end of the day. Which usually means we go out for dinner that night. There’s a Blue C Sushi right on the route from his work back home, so if neither of us is craving a specific thing, we often stop there.

I love sushi bars with conveyor belts. I can watch the little plates of sushi go by for hours. Unless I’m super hungry, in which case I’ll grab the first thing that looks the slightest bit appetizing and eat that, first. Then I’ll watch, being indecisive for varying periods of time. The conveyor is like dinner and a show, all in one! Or maybe I’m just too easily amused. Continue reading On the shores of a blue C… →

Dreams

life,

So there I am, laying in bed, having a very intense dream.

What was I doing in the dream? Watching TV. It was like a 60 Minutes report on a harassment in the workplace case which, according to the dream, had happened several years ago and had caused a major change in… Something.

And the attorney who had represent the poor worker when no one else would? Ellen Degeneres, who, again according to the dream, had tried to pursue a legal career before going into comedy.

In my dream, I was on the edge of my seat, rivetted by the drama in the news story. I don’t remember anything the slightest bit interesting about the case.

Isn’t my subconscious an exciting place?