Ted, Ted, Ted

I’m importing a bunch of old entries, and there’s a fair amount of manual work involved, so things will be kind of out of sequence around here for a little while. Bear with me.

Update: Done with 2001. Intervening years to follow as time allows.

The ability to pile up qualifiers in front of a noun is a powerful feature of English and one of its worst weaknesses. We tend to overuse it in general English, and even more in technical English.

Think of the noun “artifact.” Where I work, we frequently add a couple of qualifiers to it, such as “Project Tracker” and “defect.” Because the rules of English grammar allow us to save words by putting those qualifiers in front of the noun, we frequently do, and we get “Project Tracker defect artifact.” Add some adjectives such as “new,” or “recently modified,” and before you know it you can have a compound noun phrase that takes up two or more lines of text on your screen or page. In your mind as the writer it makes perfect sense and keeps your word count down, and it is grammatically correct, but the first-time reader finds his/her progress arrested by the need to stop and work his/her way backwards through the compound phrase to unpack its meaning.

One rule of thumb is to watch for compound noun phrases that exceed three words, and think of ways to break them up by restructuring the sentences they occur in. For example, if I wrote “This is an overly complex compound noun phrase” (five words), in the second draft I might change that to “This compound noun phrase is too complex.” (Three words.) Or better, “This phrase is too complex. It has too many nouns in a row.” (More words in total, but quicker to read — a good tradeoff.)

This is one reason why we almost never use possessives in technical communication, such as “Project Tracker’s reporting feature.” They almost always lead to excessive compounding, which might be fine in ordinary English, but not in a medium where we have to strive for total transparency.

I get to read a lot of technical documentation, both at work and at home. I enjoy it, mostly. (That’s just the kind of geek I am.) The standards are still pretty low out there, but it’s getting better.

I have found this rule useful: whenever I come to the word “simply” (or equivalents, such as “just,” “easily,” and so on), I stop reading and throw away the manual. I’d rather match wits directly with the software, bad as it may be.

These words are to tech writers what “taut” and “luminous” are to film critics: filler. They come naturally, and they support efficient verbiage production by seeming to reduce the need to actually think through what you want to say.

The worst thing about them, though, is that they are lies by definition. If the procedure were really simple (or “intuitive,” or “straightforward”), I wouldn’t be wasting my time reading the directions, would I? So I don’t.

On Thursday we took an easy (for some people, maybe, not for me) two-mile hike from Emerald Bay up to Eagle Lake. Here’s that, plus the remainder of the pics I came home with.
(Click the picture to see the rest of them.)

Laura loved that long hike. I’m told there was no whining the whole day, even though much of the walking was straight up or straight down. There was a gorgeous lake at the end of the trail. She and the rest of the kids were so wiped out afterwards, they didn’t even have the strength to object to taking their showers. We sat around most of the next day just recovering, except for some mini-golf.

We are up in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe for the week, staying in a big house we rented with three other families we know from preschool. I have pictures, but I sent my camera out with Laura this morning on an all-day hike, so the pics will come later. One of the dads is a scout troop leader and knows exactly where to take kids in the mountains around here.

It’s been magnificent so far. The weather couldn’t be any perfecter. The lake, which can be ice-cold, has had all summer to warm up (at least the top 3 feet or so) to an almost swimmable temperature. Yesterday we took an inner-tube ride down a few miles of the Truckee river, which drains Lake Tahoe out into Nevada. Some of the kids saw a river otter. There are two other kids in Lilly’s age group and four in Laura’s, so no one is sitting around with nothing to do.

My excuse for missing the hike today was that I had to drop Mary off at the train station in Truckee so she could get back to San Francisco in time for work. Teachers and staff are supposed to show up tomorrow to get things ready for school to start next week. I’m sneaking a bit of time at a coffee shop in Truckee to catch up on the chaos at work, which hasn’t died down just because I’m not there.

Craig Murray - Hitting a nerve
“I have just checked, and our flat contains nail polish remover, sports drinks, and a variety of household cleaning products. Also MP3 players and mobile phones. So the authorities could announce - as they have whispered to the media in this case - that potential ingredients of a liquid bomb, and potential timing devices, have been discovered. It rather lowers the bar, doesn’t it?”

Oh, for my birthday I got a very nice gig bag to make it easier to carry my banjo around. Maybe one or two times a week I sneak out of the office with the banjo and a lawn chair and I sit on the grass by the little marina nearby and practice my breaks. It’s better than a double shot of firewater for settling the nerves. (Although the effect on the nerves of the people trying to relax on their boats may be different.)

The Banjo Hangout is where I mostly go to print out charts and get questions answered. Banjo players tend to be very nice folks.

With all the nice calls and emails from my sisters and brother on my birthday, you would never guess how fiercely we fought when we were growing up. I like how easily we can talk to each other now, more like old friends than like people whose top preoccupation for ten or 15 years was to bother and vex and generally thwart each other in every way we could think of. It makes me despair a little less about Laura and Lilly’s constant sniping. I have to admit they don’t really seem to put the same vigor and dedication into their fighting that we did. They’ll probably end up just fine with each other. Now if I could just figure out a reliable way to tune it out until that happens.

Mary has been away at one of those professional training things since Friday (the 11th) and it’s not going so badly here, considering. Lilly got a little querulous a couple of times in the first 48 hours, but seems to believe me when I tell her Mom’s return is closer and closer. I think six months ago she would have been inconsolable; there’s been some growth going on.

I’ve had an interesting logistical challenge in getting both of them to their appointed activities at 8 am and retrieving them both at 5 pm. I’ve been enforcing punctuality for Laura’s dropoff in the morning, so that I can get Lilly in before 8:30. Being late is OK with her because she doesn’t like the breakfast they serve at her summer camp anyway, but I want her to get at least some of her RDA of runaround time in. In the afternoon I’ve reversed the order and picked up Lilly around 4 and got to Laura just a little before 5.

It would be a lot harder to pull this off during the school year, when adults seem to get all picky about kids showing up on time for things. Summer is the forgiving season.

Here’s a fine picture of Laura and Lilly taken by Mary. She has this knack for getting pretty pictures from unusual natural lighting.

First day of horse camp for Laura. This is the high point of her summer. She’s extra-motivated to bump her skills up a level or two, because we’re going to Tahoe next week and there’s likely to be lots of trail riding going on.