This is for Laura.
Archive for the ‘Geekery’ Category
Best User Guide Ever
This is what we’re up against. Perfectly intelligent people can’t tell a white paper from a user guide.
Check Snopes
before getting too excited. I don’t think they really have these cool floating cities yet.
The W3C’s new SEX 1.0 specification – O’Reilly XML Blog
I usually don’t go in for April Fool’s kind of stuff, but this is moderately funny, in a mildly geeky way.
Writers on strike
Here’s a sane and fair-minded account of why the people who write our entertainment (without whom, of course, there would be no entertainment) started withholding their labor power this week. (Note for comics fans, such as Laura: the speaker, Brian Vaughan, did some of the writing on Runaways, our current favorite Marvel series.)
This fight has [...]
Lunar Eclipse by Jeff
My friend Jeff, a CollabNet engineer and an astronomer, got up damn early the other morning and made these spectacular shots of the lunar eclipse.
Cabspotting – Cab Tracker
Way cool. Obviously the biggest use of cabs is to get from the airport to the financial district and back. In San Francisco, that means to the upper right quadrant of the city map.
Search engines in flight
This and this, taken together, are about the coolest thing I have seen on the Web in months.
Writing for geeks
Writing is not a team activity. Editing is a team activity. Writing never works collectively, because it depends on a large number of threads being held simultaneously in a person’s short-term memory. That’s not something you can share. It’s a waste of time to try. Of course, people try all the time. We can see [...]
Burning questions
I met the software architect for this cool Web 2.0 company at a staff party for one of the schools Mary works at. I’m thinking this could be a very useful tool for settling some of the burning questions that keep me awake nights, such as:
State capitalism, or deformed worker’s state?
State capitalism
Deformed worker’s state
Make Free [...]
Starr King Elementary School
Here’s the web site for Starr King school that I put together using Wordpress last month. It’s going public this weekend at the school district enrollment fair. It came to a surprisingly small effort, compared with what it used to take to make a decent-looking web site. Wordpress takes care of a whole lot of [...]
Going Bedouin
I’m getting better at catching onto internet hipster buzzwords. At this rate, by 2008 I’ll notice one while it’s actually still in use. Going Bedouin appears to be a term of art for freeloading work space at cafes with free wireless, the way I do most of the week, and look, I’m only about nine [...]
Dogfood
So I’ve been thinking. CollabNet (where I work) is all about tools for distributed development. (Mostly for software, but there are customers in biotech and manufacturing too.) Its main product includes a database component called Project Tracker (PT). The essential concept behind PT is the artifact, which is a generic work item that the user [...]
XML and translation
I’m putting this link here just to remind myself to look at some of these webinars.
Hi from Chennai
I’m in India for the second half of October, working with my team of intrepid tech writers. The Divali holiday is coming up, which in scale and importance is kind of like Christmas and Thanksgiving put together, and it seems that people start preparing for it pretty early, because the traffic this week hasn’t been [...]
Trapped
I’ve been suspecting for years that I’m less and less a separate physical being, more and more a node of the Internet. What’s cool about this is that now you can’t even talk about the possibility of netlessness outside of the network.
Baumol’s disease
Trying to decide what to make of this. Offshoring has been on my mind as I’ve been getting ready to spend the second half of October in India working with my tiny team of tech writers. I’ve been pretty clear on where I belong in this whole picture: I don’t trust corporations to manage globalization, [...]
The words and the bees
Here’s something I’ve been working on as a support for training my documentation team to convert to XML, which is a bit more fun than it sounds like but requires some fairly fundamental rethinking of what a writer does. There is a labored and over-extended analogy with bees, but I think I might keep that [...]
Good night, have a good day.
At least two nights a week I have to get back on the clock after the kids are in bed, for phone meetings with the India branch of the company I work for. Most meetings are in our evening hours, their morning. My own team meets at 10 pm Tuesdays (10:30 a.m. Wednesday, India time) [...]
Word of the day
Disambiguate.
Got to be kidding. First person on my team to use this word gets 10 pushups.