July 29th, 2010
Mindtouch has compiled a list of the 25 most influential technical communication bloggers, and it’s a pretty impressive list. In the top 10 are Adobe’s R L. Jacquez, Tom Johnson, Sarah O’Keefe, and my (soon to be ex-)coworker, Scott Nesbitt and his blogging partner Aaron Davis. Criteria for making the list were:
- The individual needed to have a blog with regular updated posts.
- The blogger needed to have external activity on 3rd party sites like Twitter for additional influence points.
- The blogger’s focus needed to be Technical Communication subject matter
I’m honoured to note that I was included in the list of honourable mentions. From the article, I guess my relatively low use of Twitter and the mixed nature of my blog kept me out of the top 25. But I’m happy with that. I’ve been wondering for a while if the blog was worth keeping up, and this makes me feel that I’m on the right track.
And there were several names I didn’t recognize, so it looks like it’s time to fire up Google Reader and add some subscriptions to my list.
Posted in Core Dump, technical communication | No Comments »
July 29th, 2010
There’s yet another scientific report that concludes that the world is warming. This one is from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
At the heart of the report is an assessment of 11 indicators one would intuitively expect to be changing if the world were warming. Specifically they found upward trends in land-surface temperature, sea levels, sea surface temperature, marine air temperature, tropospheric temperature, snow cover, specific humidity and ocean heat content.
They found ongoing declines in Arctic sea ice, glacier mass and stratospheric temperature.
Posted in Another thing to worry about, environment, science | No Comments »
July 29th, 2010
CyberText Newsletter has a post looking at the problems that dates and references to dates can cause for bloggers. For example, here’s one that I run into all the time: does 10/11/2010 mean October 11, 2010 or September 11, 2010? Take a read through the article; it may point out some problems you didn’t realize you had.
However, there are MANY websites where the content states a relative time, but gives NO specific date/time as a point of reference. For example, ‘Last month, <name of band> released their latest CD.’ There are two problems with this type of statement: the reader has no idea when ‘last month’ was if the article or web page isn’t dated, nor do they know which ‘latest’ album is being referred to, as the album isn’t named and nor is a date given. If this statement was in a newspaper, the problem isn’t so bad, as newspapers have a date on each page, which is the point of reference for the statement.
But non-commercial websites, in particular, are notorious for not dating content. Which means those researching information cannot figure out when something occurred. For some information, this isn’t an issue, but for a lot of information, the lack of a date is a real problem as it makes the content hard to verify and can lead to assumptions that may not be true. For example, let’s say you’re away from home. You read on a blog somewhere ‘Last week, <name of your town> was flooded’, but there’s no date reference. You might assume that the flood was only a few days ago and go into panic mode, whereas the flood may have been a few years ago.
Posted in language, usability | No Comments »
July 28th, 2010
Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer who is not very prolific – his wikiepdia bio lists only a dozen stories, one of those to be published as a chapbook this month. Yet those dozen stories have won won four Nebulas, three Hugos, and several other awards. As well as being a really good SF writer, he’s a technical writer, so I find his career especially interesting.
BoingBoing has a long interview with him in which he discuses writing, working as a technical writer, the difference between magic and science, and many other topics.
How has being a technical writer affected your fiction writing?
I can’t recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because it’s going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the rest of the year. It’s too difficult for me to do technical writing at the same time as fiction writing – they draw on the same parts of my brain. So I can’t say it’s a good day job in that sense, but it’s a way to make money.
Several of his stories are available online and are well worth checking out or you can look for his collection of stories, Stories of Your Life and Others, published in 2002.
Posted in SF, books | No Comments »
July 27th, 2010
Peter Grainge has put together a useful collection of Microsoft Word macros, freely downloadable from his web site. They include macros to add quotes around a selection, add HTML tags to text, fill blank rows in a table with text, and several others. Users of RoboHelp will find some of them especially useful in cleaning up Word files that RoboHelp has created.
Posted in Microsoft Word, economics and finance | No Comments »
July 27th, 2010
I used to be a real audiophile and spent a lot of time trying to upgrade my stereo system. I never had the money to get the system I wanted, but did fairly well on my limited budget. Since then, I’ve pretty much lost the bug but every once in a while, I see something that makes me go “Oh, wow. I’d love to hear that.”, and this guy’s system is definitely in that class. I don’t think I’d want something this complicated, but I’d sure like to sit down for a couple of hours with it and a few of my favourite CDs.
Each speaker horn has a conical flare and is 13 feet deep. The mouth of each front horn is 8 feet x 8 feet. At the throat, a JBL mid-range exponential horn with a pair of 2440 compression drivers delivers sound between 400 Hz and 6 kHz. An array of 30 Cerwin-Vega tweeters reproduces sound from 6 kHz to 20 kHz. Behind the mid-range horn are two 16-inch Empire woofers covering 15 Hz to 400 Hz. The left front and right front horns each have two 24-inch Cerwin-Vega sub-woofers for frequencies below 50 Hz.
Posted in If I had a million dollars, technology | No Comments »