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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m putting this link here just to remind myself to look at some of these webinars.
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 [...]
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.
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, [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
Disambiguate. Got to be kidding. First person on my team to use this word gets 10 pushups.
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 [...]
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 [...]
If you’re tired of remembering web passwords, Robert Graham, the chief software guy at the company where I work, is your friend.
I keep trying to convince myself that Dave Winer is exaggerating on this one, but it looks like he’s not. Here he articulates the reason I’ve made Opera my default browser, as part of my phased plan to, maybe by the end of the year, have things fixed up so the only Microsoft products I [...]
I like the bridge, but I love the tunnel.
From: Stevens, Martha (ISSAtlanta) Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 10:26 AM To: documentation team Subject: science fair Hi, I am a high school sophomore and I have chosen “hacking” as my topic for this year’s science fair.The prize is a pair of tickets to see N’sync, and I, like, really, really, really want to win!!!!Can [...]
This is true: my head is increasingly a part of the Internet. If I could take some weight off, I could call myself a thin client.