Only a Nerd Will Understand

It's odd. I haven't typed on my old TRS Color Computer III keyboard in, what, nearly 20 years, but, on occasion, I still carry an odd typing tic I picked up from that keyboard. Once and a while when I want a double quotation mark, I do the old SHIFT+2 combination, which, as you can see in this picture, gets you the double quote mark on that keyboard -- the "@" symbol is all off by itself, next to the P. Which is what I get when I do the SHIFT+2 combo on modern keyboards.

I told you only a nerd would understand.

Mommy, I Want to Start A Meme of My Own

The only things more ubiquitous than being tagged to produce a "25 Random Things About Me" list in Facebook are ads for teeth whiteners and bloggers, pundits and other bloviators carping about the "25 Random Things About Me" phenomenon on Facebook.

The Washington Post's, available here, was the most comical, in my view, as the author laments not only the stupididy of such lists, but their inescapable draw even to those who roll their eyes as soon as they receive the request.

Slate.com's take, available here, is the most scientific I read. Most appealing is the writer's prescription for promulgating a similar Intertubes viral phenomenon: "introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme." It's a good lesson on finding popularity on the Web, and also a cautionary tale that on the Web, as in nature, slow growth is probably the best thing to hope for, because fast growth tends to burn itself out, much like a virus --though I have had viruses that clung on for weeks.

All this gets me to thinking, of course, about Uncharted. Last night we finally, FINALLY unveiled a story submission module that works. I feel like I've been freed from prison. The old module was so balky that I had been able to submit only one new story between Christmas Break and yesterday. Now we've been freed from our Internet prison, free to pass on our drivel to the unsuspecting populace.

And, yes, I did complete a list. And now that I've mentioned it, it doesn't seem fair not to repeat it here:

1) My secret hero is Wally from the Dilbert comic strips.
2) I don't care if I'm seen wearing the same shirt twice in the same week. Like this week.
3) I often go out into the snow for brief excursions without shoes or socks.
4) I have dreams about tracting and always wake up from them upset.
5) When I become old, I'm going to have wild, crazy grey hair and walk up to random people and ask "Are you related to Crazy Jake?"
6) My favorite advice to give: Beware Bald Men.
7) I have a collection of rocks that resemble pigs' noses.
8) My wife hates it when I pick up a rock, hold it up to my face and say "Hey look! It's a pig nose!"
9) I secretly enjoy the orange shag carpeting in the study downstairs.
10) I'd like to get a cat. But my wife hates cats. So no cats.
11) I'm looking forward to spring so I can clean out the toolshed.
12) My idea of a wild night is watching the LOTR trilogy back-to-back-to-back.
13) I'd like to go back to France -- preferably Perigueux -- and wander through the town late at night doing my own theme song like "Kronk" from "The Emperor's New Groove."
14) Sometimes I still wish I'd become an astronomer. But I stink at math.
15) I'm thinking about forming "The International Association of W Lovers" on Facebook as a joke. And if you think this is about Dubya, you're wrong. Think Sesame Street.
16) I'd like to open up "Yellowstone Bare World, Idaho's Premier Nudist Colony," right next to Yellowstone Bear World on Highway 20.
17) If furniture stores are ever targets of terrorist attacks, it's probably me.
18) When I was a kid I fully expected to be living on the moon at 37 years of age.
19) I like to go to the campus of BYU-Idaho to show off my manly beard stubble.
20) If I ever go to Albuquerque, I'm taking that left toin.
21) Part of me wishes I'd become a hermit.
22) Part of me is glad the rest of me doesn't listen to the part of me that wishes I'd become a hermit.
23) I used to be grossed out by parents who fed their kids off their own plates. Now I have three kids. There are sooo many more things to be grossed out about.
24) My fingernails are getting more brittle with age. I think I have cancer or something.
25) If I had $5 right now, I'd spend it all on comic books.

And since I'm babbling, here's a rather entertaining article I read about blogging, or specifically blogging for money. Which I don't do here. This is solely for entertainment purposes only. And at that, it's only mildly entertaining.

Blimp Attack!

And we all thought Mr. Burns was foolish to want to prepare his nuclear plant workers for a blimp attack.

Ah, blimps. Hearkens me back to a bygone era (fitfully and briefly revived in the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) where mankind actually built things and looked forward to the future with optimism, not some kind of vague apprehension or, at minimum, blind indifference. I suppose part of it is that we've seen what technology can do for us, and it's not all good; mankind's ills can't be cured by gyroscopic stabilizers, an awful lot of hydraulics and bank after bank of vacuum tubes, transistors, microprocessors or those little nano-machines that are all the rage with the brainy types now.

But we could use some of that optimism these days. Nowadays all we get is the head of NASA saying it's better to send robots, rather than man, to Mars because they cn accomplish what we need done at a lesser expense.

We need less of that. We need more of things like this: Greetings from the Navy Blimps:

The blimps, I understand, evolved into rather effective submarine-hunters for the Navy. I still like the idea of military blimps, if not for the only reason of showing those Goodyear showoffs a thing or two.

I'd also thrill to ride in a blimp. I've come close, by riding in a hot air balloon at the Grand Teton Hot Air Balloon Festival at Driggs, Idaho, but sitting in a wicker basket while a bunch of cows on the ground moo and come a runnin' our direction isn't the same as the kind of quiet elegance and adventure I'd feel in a little cabin slung under the belly of one of these silver-skinned whales of the air. Damn. I waxed poetic. Now I gotta get the cleanser.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

"Frank, I swear I'm going to put in your record that you do not play well with others." (Col. Henry Blake)

Blogger's Note: More on Effective Publications Management, by Cathy Connor Lips. Thoughts on Chs. 6 and 7, regarding planning and personnel issues.

First impression: Help! I’m drowning in lists!

Second impression: Getting everyone in sync when you’re working on a publication is a maddening experience – but it can happen, depending on how critical the publication is to getting work done.

Bottlenecks change: If you’d talked to us six months ago, our entire writing group at my day job would have said that the worst bottleneck in our publication process was getting reviews out of the Unreviewed Safety Question group. These are the guys who look at our work and compare it to requirements in our safety basis documents. We have to have their signatures on about 95 percent of our documents for them to be approved. The USQ group used to be a terrible bottleneck, where work from multiple groups went to languish or die.

Ask us now, and we’ll tell you – USQ, while still overburdened, is not the bottleneck problem. We’ve worked on improving our communication with the group, letting them know where the priorities lie within our group and within the Operations group, which ordinarily is pushing for document approvals.

Ironically, now it’s the Operations group that is the bottleneck. If it’s urgent to them to have a document approved, they can turn things around rather quickly. If, however, a document we’d like to finish doesn’t excite their interests, it languishes, even though their input is required. Part of the problem here lies with a shift in management focus that has made the operations group much busier than they were in the past, so they have less time for document reviews. Naturally, they let slip what isn’t critically important to them.

Managing yourself: It’s interesting that Lips mentions this almost in passing. She’s shown throughout this chapter that her idea of publications management is a complex thing, with lots of items and variable to juggle, and in this section only mentions that we will want to find a way of tracking all this, “depending on [our] style.” I’d like to see some examples. She mentions calendars, wall charts, excel, a source mentions a FTP site, yes. But how? Because I’ve tried calendars, wall charts, Excel, FTP sites and other management items, from Basecamp to notes scrawled on paper, and I’ve yet to find something that everyone can agree on – because this isn’t something a good project manager is going to keep to himself or herself. Everyone involved ought to be able to see, at a glance, how things overall are working.

For example, I like that Lips emphasizes that the designer should be able to read the copy in order to understand what message to bring across in the design. Conversely, I think it’s important for the writer to be cognizant of what’s going on in design in order to help out with things like bulleted lists, pull quotes, and any other textual information that might translate better as an emphasized design element, rather than as mere copy.

Building the Team: I used to think that an individual’s talent should come first when it comes to deciding whether or not you want to work with them. Experiences – both happy and sad – over the past few years have proved to me that talent is No. 2, right after a good answer to the question “Can you work and play well with others?” This ability comes in degrees. I’ve noticed that the most friction comes from people who insist that it’s their way or the highway. Some people, like me, are able to moderate that feeling, by sticking to our guns on the things we regard as critical, but never ruling out compromise when it’s obvious that compromise is the only way to move forward. Others don’t have that moderating influence, and that leads to trouble in a hurry. Uncharted, for example, has lost two volunteers over the past few years, partly due to uncompromising natures, both in those who left and in those who have remained.

We’ve noted it’s important to be aware of any conflicts that may arise and to have a plan in place to nip those conflicts as quickly as possible. That process is core to Lips’ book: An emphasis on constant and clear communication, in forms that satisfy the varying preferences of individual team members. (For example, I would much rather exchange e-mails or IM than chat on the phone, because being on the phone limits my ability to multitask.) Others, however, prefer phone calls to other forms of communication. Again, the best team members are those who are willing to work past their own limitations and inhibitions to play with the team vibe. Those who can’t adapt are most likely those who will have conflicts.

“A lot of creative talents have strong egos and might exercise them more than most,” Lips says (p. 99-100) It can be difficult for anyone to hear criticism or handle rejection or work he’s created.” Though she writes this about writers, this certainly applies for any creative person you’ll want to include on your team. I find my ego rising and my inability to hear criticism rise when Uncharted’s copy editor is commenting on my copy – and Uncharted’s copy editor is my wife, herself no slouch as a writer, but infinitely more patient and open to constructive criticism than her hot-head husband. Thankfully, I’m learning to moderate my reactions. It’s one thing to get the copy editor mad at you. But when it’s your wife, that’s much more serious.

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?

I read a review of the Adobe Dreamweaver software and came to this passage:

“The fun of producing a simple website in Dreamweaver is gone. The upgrades have not made it easier, they have made it much more demanding, and the never particularly good online help has become even worse. On the other hand, it is much more powerful. In effect, it has moved from an application most people can use to an application designed strictly for professionals.”

At first, I felt pretty sorry for myself as a technical communicator. As I have mentioned, I have limited experience in HTML, and my experiences with XML, CSS and other such alphabet soup boils down to tinkering I did on the web nearly 12 years ago to frustrating WYSIWYG editors to Dave’s class last semester, in which we learned to read the signposts but not converse fluently in the language. It’s not fair, I whined, that technology is changing things in my field so rapidly, leaving me behind even as I try to keep up with it all. As far as HTML, XML and CSS go, I’m still firmly in the “most people” category, and far from the “strictly for professionals” wing of the party.

So, how will this impact me? I’ve got to keep learning. Learning to tag in these languages is an important thing. Learning to work with people who know how to tag, in order to ensure that quality writing – my specialty – comes through in whatever form the future demands is more important.

Oddly enough, I’m taking some inspiration from a biography of Walt Disney by Leonard Mosley. In his book, Mosely details how, in 1933, Disney announced to his animators that many of the shortcuts thy relied on to produce their cartoons were going to be outlawed, and that teams of new animators were going to be brought in to the studio to learn techniques that would make Disney’s characters less rubber-limbed and jerky, turning them into characters viewers could believe were real. “To an increasingly apprehensive audience,” Mosley writes, “Walt warned that much of the expertise they had acquired at the studios over the years was now unnecessary, out of date, and would have to be unlearned.” Many animators were afraid they were going to lose their jobs because they didn’t have the skills he was looking for. But some of them adapted. They attended classes Disney set up for the new animators. In those classes, Disney then challenged the way things had been done, demanding, for example, that the models his animators were sketching move about and, indeed, sometimes leave the room after going through a range of fluid movements, hoping his artists could reproduce the movements from memory – thus getting away from the static drawing that made his earlier cartoons jerky.

We’re not the first to have new challenges and new technology impact our jobs. Like some of Disney’s animators, we can learn this new stuff too. But we’ll have to be willing to consider that some of the old ways we’re used to doing things are outdated.

That being said, the question arose somewhere this week on what will happen to quality writing as it moves into this new paradigm. The answer to that is that for the good writers who learn to adapt, the quality writing will follow. Disney – nor many of his earlier animators – didn’t give up the ghost when the new edict came out. They carried their desire to create quality cartoons through the new techniques and ended up with quality cartoons built a different way.

Protip

Reguar readers of this blog know the following about me:

1) I hate it when people misspell things.
2) I misspell things often.

These two facts, bubbling around in my brain, do not make for classic matter/antimatter explosions. Because of No. 1, I am working as hard as I can on No. 2 to check and verify and repair my spelling so my head doesn't explode when I read my own stuff.

But reading what's out there on the Internet still hurts.

So here's a protip, and a compromise. I will learn to spell the word antenna without looking it up in the dictionary. I understand if you spell something out ten or twenty times a day for several days, you don't forget it. So here goes:

antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna
antenna

(It's going to help if I forget phonics and pronounce it anTENna in my head. That'll help me with my spelling.)

Now it's your turn: Please, for the love of Mike, learn to spell the word lose. As in "I'm going to lose everything." I don't know how many times I see people write "I'm going to loose everything." That's fine if your're standing amid a couple dozen weasel cages and have prepared a Rube Golderg device to open all the cages at once, loosing the weasels. But if loosing the weasels is going to cause you to lose everything, please make sure you spell lose right.

Just How Bad is it Out There?

A few months ago, I was at the ATM at the credit union, chatting with a lady who was painting an advertising mural on the union's windows. We got to talking about the economy. She mentioned her husband had just been laid off from a job as a painter, and was looking for work. That, I'll admit, was my first hint that this recession was going to be more than something they jabber about on the television.

There, but for the grace of God goes I, I suppose I could say. I actually hit my financial and career nadir iin 2005, when I quit a job I didn't like any more. Took more than a year to find the job I currently have. Learned a lot in that year. Learned that you find work where you can, and often work two jobs to make sure things keep going. I hated that worse than I hated the job I left. I'm glad I'm happy where I work now, glad that, at least for the moment, things here appear recession-proof. I've survived three layoffs here already, and look to survive another one coming up in March. I would not want to be job-hunting now, given the economic climate. **Knocks very loudly on wood** Maybe I'm lucky I did my career hopping four years ago. Maybe that was a way to get me prepared for now.

Then there's this: bailoutbooth.com. It's a new classified ad website, where, by all appearances, the brokers give you cahs for what you want to sell. They're taking advantage of the current economic crisis. What's most telling, however, are the stories told to Bailout Bill here. Some of these hurt -- they're from folks who are genuinely (at least as genuinely as the Internet can be) having trouble. Then there are the comical stories from people who woefully overestimate themselves and waste money, like the guy who blew $6,000 trying to save a cashew tree, the Brooklynite looking for help so she can maintain her lifestyle which includes a 150-lb St. Bernard, and the high school dropout who is $3,000 in credit card debt and rueing the fact that his lackof a high school diploma is making it "a little difficult" to get into college. So a collage of the sensical and nonsensical, the deserving with the dumb. Arianna Huffington over at the Huffington Post may have bragged that "This recession will be blogged," but it' won't be by her or pretenders like those at unemploymentality.com. It'll be thanks to Bailout Bill.

Addendum: Of course, you have to wonder what is worse: the apparent lack of financial sense exhibited by some posting their requests to Bailout Bill, or folks like me, the ambulance chasers of the Recession of Aught Nine. Don't get me wrong: I have a lot of sympathy for people who find themselves in financial straits, whether they deserve to be there or not. My Dad, an immigrant from the Netherlands, often said that the United States is a great country to live in if you have money, but if you don't it's one of the worst places. Growing up, he said, they were poor but didn't know it, because everyone else was doing the same thing, namely bragging about having THREE kinds of vegetables for dinner. Get poor here (and pretty much everywhere in the developed world) and you know it.

Uh, I Think I'll Stay Home

I'm not sure if this is due to a computer reporting glitch or what, but it sure doesn't look good.

Going Herbal

It appears, at the Davidson home, that we are going herbal. Due to a sinus cold that lingered for more than two weeks, and thanks to a lady in the neighborhood who has done her research into the world of natural remedies, Michelle is finally recovering from her cold. She's taken some odd concoctions -- garlic and parsley pills -- and she's been doing something or other with grapeseed oil. She confided in me tonight that the stinky pills she's been taking taste bad going down, but are even worse coming up.

It all has to do, or so says our neighborhood remedy researcher, to cleaning out the liver and helping it do its job of ridding the body of toxins, something I thought was primarily the duty of the bowel. Part of me can't help but to think of Tim Conway doing a bad imitation of Euell Gibbons, roaming about the set muttering "Many parts of the pine tree are edible" while taking bites out of chairs and tables. But this gal is going to hook me up with some pretty wicked lemon and peppermint oil, which, she says, is the cure-all for seasonal allergies. Given that the current allergy medication I take takes at least a week to kick in and occasionally leaves my fingers numb as it works its wonders on the sinuses, I can't say that I'd come out any worse, going the herbal route.

But it is a little comical -- because when I lived in France, just about every ailment is pegged to liver difficulty there. That reminds me of an Asterix and Obelix comic book, from which I've pulled a few panels for our amusement:


Here, Obelix defends Dogmatix's bone from the foraging Roman (starved into oblivion in a reducing spa where the food is limited to boiled vegetables) by threatening a "poke in the liver" in retribution.

That was inspired by this even, depicting his chief's illness (due to, his wife says, overeating) and sensitive liver:

Ouch! the chief yells. Obelix asks, "Can I try too?" with the predicted effect.

So I'll keep you up to date, sporadically, on our entry into the herbal realm. I'm optimistic we'll see some results. Why not let chemistry involving natural elements have an equal chance with chemistry brewed up in a pharmaceutical plant? Nature is where most of that stuff gets started anyway.

Tinkering

Yes, I'm tinkering a bit. Trying to master some mad skillz. Which, obviously, do not include proofreading. As Marvin the Martian would say, "Well, back to the old drawing board."