July 5th, 2005, 4 Comments »
My brother Kevin is a writer as well. His day-job is as a technical writer at Creo, a recently-acquired subsidiary of Kodak. He’s also launched a recent white paper-writing business called (funnily enough) Barefoot White Papers. He’s got a nifty blog there all about white papers, which I enthusiastically recommend.
Now we also do white papers at Capulet, so he’s kind of competition, but there’s plenty of work to go around.
June 10th, 2005, 1 Comment »
This is the best new submission to the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. It’s apparently taken in Amsterdam. As far as I can figure, it means “don’t slap your partner at the disco”.
March 28th, 2005, Comments Off
People really dig the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. After the home page, it’s the most popular section of this site. I probably get one new submission every week, but I only use a third of them. I mostly reject submissions because, in my opinion, they’re not weird, not funny or replicate the wonderful Engrish.com. I have a few Engrish samples, but I don’t want to become a bad-translation site.
I finally got around to updating the thing. We’re now up to 96 exhibits. My favourite new entry remains this hilarious graphic on the corner of a tea box. Other good ones include some obvious advice regarding a nail gun, a rather cruel sign and some sound parenting advice from Marks and Spencers.
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November 16th, 2004, 3 Comments »
Cross-posted from my dayjob blog.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article for Intercom magazine called Ten Tips for Writing Whitepapers (PDF). I just had a quick glance through it, and I think every thing’s still relevant.
Regardless, my technical writer brother sent me two other articles on writing whitepapers. There’s 10 tips for writing compelling white papers and How to Write a White Paper – A White Paper on White Papers. The latter requires registration, and apparently the registrations get vetted before you receive their article. In light of the fact that I used my spam account at Capulet (a company that, you know, writes whitepapers), I’m unlikely to receive a copy. If anybody else registers and gets a copy, send it on to me, would you?
October 12th, 2004, Comments Off
As regular readers will know, I run this silly thing called the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. It’s due for another update, and hopefully I get to that before the year is out. Paul writes to point out the fun serendipity between the images and the Google ads that run below each item (I should really get more mercantile and move those ads to above the images). In particular, he sent me this image, which would clearly help out those who didn’t heed the image in question. Scroll down to the bottom to see what I mean.
As I click around, there’s some amusing Google ad interactions on this image and this one.
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August 24th, 2004, Comments Off
I was just contacted by a recruiter who was looking for a senior technical writer for a full-time contract of indeterminate length in a suburb of Vancouver. It’s apparently a B2B software project. I know that’s pretty vague, but that’s all I managed to learn. I couldn’t help her out, but said I would ask around in case I knew anyone who might be interested. She emphasized that they’re looking for a senior writer, as this is a ground-up rewrite project updating some legacy manuals.
If you’re interested, or know someone who is interested, drop me an email (my first name at this URL dot com).
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August 17th, 2004, 1 Comment »
Since the recent update to the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, I’ve received a number of quality new submissions. While it may take me a couple of months to get around to updating the Hall, I had to post this one here–it struck me as particularly funny.
Robin sent this in, saying that it’s an illustration “on the side panel of a box of tea. Yogi Tea’s Ginger Tea apparently makes one want to smell other people’s bums.” You can just make out a colour version of the diagram from this promotional photo. It’s even funnier if you note that the text immediately under the drawing reads “inhale deeply through the nose”.
August 17th, 2004, Comments Off
Speaking of the Hall, a visitor emailed me to say that his friend runs swanksigns, a similar site “born of a love for the strange and bizarre, and mocking said strange and bizarre items”. Impressively (and amusingly), they’ve got 156 signs, of which this one and this poor bastard are early favourites. I had a quick scan through the gallery, and remarkably I don’t think there are any duplicates between my site and his. Apparently there are plenty of goofy signs to go around.
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