Beryl Writes!

Have you seen any erlangs lately?

2012-01-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

A funny article about technology terms that fade away with the technology:

Have you seen any erlangs lately? Erlangs are a unit used to measure voice traffic on a telephone network.

What's sad is the comments section is filled with other obsolete terms that I recognize.

Android Design

2012-01-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

A great resouce for designing applications for the Android operating system:

http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

I love my Droid, but I must admit that the Wild West of app development has produced some awful looking stuff.

I know that it's unutterably geeky of me, but I really like design documents, style books, and resouces that help create a unified product vision.

Gripes

2012-01-17T17:17:00.000-08:00

Todd posted this:

see more Funny Graphs

This makes me rant a bit about remembering when the A&E channel stood for "Arts & Entertainment." I remember getting basic cable and really enjoying a presentation of The Mikado in which the Lord High Executioner's song had an encore wherein he listed all of the modern annoyances that would call for his sword's work (people that talked loudly on cell phones in public places, etc..).

Or when MTV was about music...or when Discovery was about science...or...

Back in the 1990s, one of the big arguments against funding of PBS was that these new cable channels would provide diversity of programming and fill the econiche of public TV.

How I wish it were true. The only channel that has kept true to that kind of charter is ESPN

Snake Oil?

2012-01-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

At Information Is Beautiful, a great interactive graphic on the relative proven efficacy of various food supplements. The visualization updates itself from a Google Doc.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/

The Problem With Offshoring

2011-08-23T14:56:00.001-07:00

Steve Denning has a great read in Forbes titled, Why Amazon Can't Make a Kindle in the USA, about the consequences of all the offshoring of industry that has been done in the last 40 years.

While I love my HP laptop, my Droid smartphone, and the fact that I can back up my home system to terabyte-sized hard drives, there is a cost:

Bingo. One company gone, another has taken its place. There’s no stupidity in the story. The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focus on on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.

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So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.

The Writing Profession has fallen on some tough times. Changing markets, changing needs, and the disappearance of clients that used to be good customers.

Pinkslipped!

2011-06-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

No, Gentle Reader, I have not had to hit the bricks. I have been enjoying the work of writer Susannah Breslin at Forbes Magazine's online outlet. Ms Breslin writes about life after downsizing in her blog series, "Pinkslipped."

(Just a note that her journalistic work has included stories written about workers in the Adult Film industry. Nothing squicky that I have encountered, but your net filters may disagree with my assesment.)

A general URL to link to is : http://blogs.forbes.com/susannahbreslin/

A couple of good postings include:

How to Fail at a Job Interview

How Not to Get the Salary That You Want

How to Tell a War Story

How to Get a Raise

How I Went from Downsized to Self-Employed in Four Months

Pluralizing Latinate Words

2010-09-02T14:04:00.001-07:00

In a recent mailing list I encountered this question:

I sit on a committee with a man who insists the word "fora" is the plural of"forum."

I have argued that: 1) in 35 years of editorial work and over 50 years of reading I have never seen "fora" used as the plural of "forum"-ever; 2) it is easily misread as "flora" because people are unused to seeing that form of the noun; 3) it is so seldom used as to cause readers to be taken aback by it and think it is a typo; 4) it is pretentious; 5) it is the second spelling of the plural given in Webster's. He requires documentation for my position. I require documentation for his (and I'll love to see what he comes up with).

This guy is 80+ years old and this is a friendly debate. Can anyone point me to a reference for this?

Ah! I remember the Good Old Days when conferences with my editor, Victor, would devolve in to shouting matches over hyphen usage...

I forwarded to the writer this great "Ask the Editor" video from Merriam Webster, concerning the plural of "octopus" (unfortunately, it is not embeddable):

http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/0015-octopus.htm?&t=1283451411

The conclusion?

"Whenever a foreign word enters the English language, it becomes an English word and gets inflected just like other English words."

Because we English speakers have no equivalent of L'Académie française, it is perfectly OK to say "forums" or "fora." Just drive a stake in the ground and stick to it.

(P.S. For my money "Fora" sounds a bit stilted.)

Challenges and Opportunities

2009-06-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

The recent downturn has caused a lot of pain both for the average Technical Writer and for the Society as a whole. Much of the angst has been directed at companies that are moving operations "offshore."

There has been a lot of dust kicked up on discussion boards and mailing lists over this issue. Some Society member point out that the STC is an international organization, and that the "shore" in "offshore" depends on where on the globe that you are working.

Two thoughts about this, one quick and one more involved.

The first thought concerns the revenue shortfalls at The Society.

If people providing technical documentation to "globally resourced" companies (i.e., those that offshored their documentation works) were dues-paying members of The Society, there would be little financial pain. I am not in the councils of the mighty, but perhaps The Society could focus on encouraging memberships in the emerging economies?

The second concerns the changing world security picture in light of the actions in China, Iran, India, and other global hotspots.

I just read Bob Cringely's column about the appointment of a "Cyberwar Czar" in the current administration. Of of the several points that Mr. Cringely makes is that the "Czar" will have authority in the United States, while much of the digital infrastructure development and support is being sent to other countries.

...Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades. There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive. The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents...
...The result, of course, is that any major power has to be concerned about the cyber security of all its technology partners, which over the last decade has come to include a lot of Third World nations. Try to do a security audit of Argentina or Bangladesh and see what nightmare is unveiled. Yet this is exactly where major international companies are deploying more and more technical resources.

I don't want to wax Axelrodian here, but I think that it would behoove some corporate officers to look at moving some of the most sensitive parts of their operations back onshore.

Elements at 50

2009-05-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times presents an interesting article on Elements of Style by Strunk and White turning 50. The article contains lots of grumping about how the book is dated, overrated, and inconsistent.

But Sam Roberts, the author, points out that Elements is not really a book of grammar, but as its title suggests, a book of style. And as a book of style it is more about writing readable prose than following seemingly arbitrary rules.

I feel so old school with my copies of Elements, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and Follett's, Modern American Usage: A Guide on my shelf.

Color Scheme Designer

2009-05-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

A nifty tool for designing web page color schemes.

Now all I need to do is to employ it on my own sites!

http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/

Twitter

2009-05-05T16:09:00.001-07:00

I'm twittering!

GIMP Blues

2009-04-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

I am working on the my online portfolio (found over at BerylWrites.com). Along with lots of PDFs of help files, this portfolio contains scans of corporate image ads that I wrote many moons ago -- scans of xerographic copies of magazine tearsheets. Ugh!

I am trying to spruce these up using the Gimp. I have cleaned up some ruled lines, and I have decided to paste over the text with text boxes. I have located the typeface and have retyped the text. Now I'm moneying around with line spacing and kerning, trying to get the text to fit into the old ad's space.

I do miss having a graphic artist around to do this stuff.

Freelance Survivor's Guide

2009-04-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is posting her book-in-progress "The Freelancer’s Survival Guide" on her blog.

This post marks the beginning of an experiment. I will post sections of a work in progress—a book tentatively titled The Freelancer’s Survival Guide—here, on my website.

The book hasn’t sold. I haven’t tried to sell it. I haven’t even written it yet. In fact, the book hasn’t been much more than a glimmer in my eye for a decade. But now’s the time to do this project.

As a freelancer, I will be following Ms Rush's work. You can always pick up a few tips.

Speaking of tips, she's put up a tip jar. I just hit it; I encourage anyone who profits from her writing to do so.

Hard Times

2009-04-03T14:10:00.001-07:00

The STC has been bending over backwards trying to get members to attend this year's Technical Communication Summit. First they announced the ability to split payments for the conference's fee. Next they announced 250 scholarships for members who have been laid off or had at least a 10% drop in business.

Now they are announcing that they have twisted the arm of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta into dropping room rates from $179 to $159.

Man, I wish I could go, but my customer is approaching a product ship date then and I know that they are going to want me available.

Eating the Dogfood

2009-03-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

"We eat our own dogfood," is the claim of many software companies. The phrase means that the software creators use their own product and so have knowledge of its strengths and shortcomings. "Dogfooding" is a great way to stay aware of the status of bugs and their resolutions.

The shortcomings of this practice include falling into the "Not Invented Here" syndrome.

Let me add another.

If you daily use a particular interface, you have climbed up high on the learning curve and may loose a gut feeling for how steep that curve can be.

A case in point: I am currently using Madcap Flare to create a manual set. I have used Flare quite a lot last summer updating help files.

But right now I am stumbling over how to create TOC entries using the "drag and drop" method. I can drop topics, but I am unable to drag and drop chapter folders. The two objects have quite different behaviors.

This is not a bleg. By the time you read this I will have made the conceptual leap won't think about it again.

But I won't get back that hour that I just spent cursing the Flare GUI design team.

Did I miss the Victory Celebration?

2009-03-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

It occured to me the other day that the clash over gender-neutral usage is pretty much over.

Being a writer with an ambisexual name I took quite a bit of interest in the subject back in the 1980s. I wrote a few articles about it for newsletters.

But with all the hullabaloo over war, politics, and the economy (read: getting a paying gig), the struggle over gender-neutral usage seems to be, if not over, at least set aside.

So, welcome humans of every gender (or lack thereof)!

Best Neologism of the Month

2009-03-17T16:03:00.001-07:00

"hypovehiculation" From the political phrase that describes abandoning a former ally as, "throwing them under a bus."

First cite: Best of the Web for March 17, 2009

Fail Better!

2009-03-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

I recently participated in a survey of independent Technical Writers. The survey was for an article (to be published in the STC organ) focusing on responses to the recent economic downturn. The author, Elizabeth (Bette) Frick, Ph.D., was kind enough to send along a draft copy of the article from which I will now shamelessly copy (emphasis mine):

I have two quotes over my desk:

1) “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
2) “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Samuel Beckett)

...An anonymous responder summed up this discussion: “The essential law of economics as well as nature is that we must adapt to conditions as opposed to standing still and hoping that conditions change to make our present situation relevant....”