April 16th, 2004, 1 Comment »
This is not your father’s technical documentation anymore. Howtoons are one-page cartoons showing 5-to-15 year-old kids how to build things. I particularly like their explanation of binary. Why leave restrict this to 5-to-15 year-olds? I’d enjoy assembling a bookshelf a lot more if the instructions came with mustachioed villains and buxom heroines.
March 31st, 2004, 4 Comments »
After months of neglect, I finally updated the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. The new Hall has 37 images (well up from the previous 15) and is easier to navigate, thanks to the excellent free image-management software, JAlbum.
Since I launched the Hall, I’ve been meaning to cite this bizarre press hit I got on it from the Italian Libero News. I asked my Italian-speaking ex-pat friend James to translate a paragraph:
The man who makes sense of senseless instructions is the American blogger Darren “Barefoot”. On his site, he has listed about 15 examples gathered from here and there. First in the list is a figure tripping over a curved line that extends out from a big box. The caption reads: “If you drop this packing box on a dog, be careful you don’t trip over its tail.”
I’m not sure how they concluded that I was American. The quotation marks around my last name are understandable, given its unlikelihood as a surname. James goes on to write that “the rest of the article describes other entries on your list - one that receives particular note is the dildo-like fitting (next to last in your list) - the commentary reads ‘No comment.’”
Regular readers may recall that back in August, 2003, I got Slashdotted. Fool that I am, I’ve submitted the revised Hall to Slashdot. While I don’t like my odds of acceptance (I’m batting about 3-for-11 for story submissions), I figured I’d chance it.
UPDATE: I see that my story submission was accepted by Slashdot, but it hasn’t been posted to the front page yet. Once it does, this site will probably get jacked for a few hours as the Slashdot Effect kicks in. I’ve warned my ISP, but there probably isn’t much they can or will do.
March 19th, 2004, 1 Comment »
I had this idea in the shower this morning. I expect some version of it is already happening, so in sharing it I’m hoping somebody might point me to the appropriate projects. As you may know, the popular video game Grand Theft Auto is quite a franchise. They continue to set new games and expansion packs in different cities.
Imagine if you could play Grand Theft Auto (or any similarly urban game) set in your town, where your town is any settlement on the planet with more than, say, 5000 people. Here’s how I think it would work:
Read more…
March 12th, 2004, 7 Comments »
Slashdot cites this CNN article that discusses how an increasing number of Americans are apparently moving to India to follow the work:
Instead of protesting against the offshoring of work that might have goneto U.S. firms like his, Dunn, 55, has decided to get in on the game. Call it a case of, "If you can’t beat them, collaborate with them." Recently, Dunn found himself contacting head hunters in Bangalore — southern India’s Silicon Valley — where many information technology (IT) and other white-collar jobs have sprouted in recent years.
I can’t imagine that the money’s good, but MonsterIndia currently lists 193 jobs for the query ‘technical writer’ throughout the country.
March 10th, 2004, 1 Comment »
This PDF report (and the lengthy discussion that follows) comes from the popular technical writers’ email list that I subscribe to and, rarely, actually read. Basically, it’s a study that lists a host of professions that are at risk of getting offshored (does a less-attractive verb exist?). You can read the summary list of professions here. Quick, look for your job!
I’m confident that offshoring will continue to grow. The costs savings obviously outweigh any downside in terms of decreased quality or increased administration. Fellow list member Bill Swallow says it better than I can:
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Run-of-the-mill tech writing is easily outsourced, as is most programming, testing, and the like. We’re the factory workers of the 21st century; if you can build a process out of a series of tasks and enforce standardization, you have yourself the means of automating much of what you do and can outsource the rest wherever you’d like. Don’t believe me? Look at the dynamic shift in how Tech Writers work and the tasks they generally perform over the past 50 years. We leapt from pencil-wielding authors to electron-spinning jack-of-all-trades in that time span. Change is inevitable, and money talks.
So, what’s a tech writer to do? I’m not really a tech writer anymore. I am occasionally, but these days I do far more work in marketing. Why? It’s more interesting. Also, marketing is much harder to outsource. Generally it requires cultural savvy, business knowledge and intimate awareness of market forces. These are difficult to acquire from India or China.
March 1st, 2004, No Comments »
How can recognize a drowning WordPerfect user?
He’s yelling ‘F3! F3!’
I laughed way too hard at that. From this Slashdot thread.
February 27th, 2004, 1 Comment »
Recently, a colleague of mine has started a weblog. She emailed me to ask:
Do you think potential employers would react positively when they read my rants about **insert subject here**? Obviously, if I knew the industry I’d like to target, I would tend to write about issues affecting that particular
business, but what if I wanted to be a generalist, how would I approach this
then?
An interesting question, so I thought I’d share my answer:
February 24th, 2004, 2 Comments »
From the popular (well, among font fondlers) TECHWR-L mailing list, Karen writes:
Four design engineers approached me with a wording problem. “We have multiple master clocks,” they said. “And one of them is more important than the others. There are also slave clocks, which are slaves to the masters. We call the most important master clock the Chief clock. Can we call the other master clocks Indians?”
The opening line reminded me of an old joke. A electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer and a software engineer are in a car, driving along the highway, when the car shudders and starts smoking. Pulling the car over to the should, the three discuss the problem.
The electrical engineer leans back in his seat, scratches his head and says “well, clearly it’s a problem in the car’s electrical system.”
The mechanical engineer disagress. “Clearly we have blown a gasket.”
They both turn to the software engineer for his opinion. He shrugs. “I don’t know what you guys are talking about. All we need to do is get out of the car and get back in again, and everything should be fine.”
Lame, I know.
November 13th, 2003, 1 Comment »
Apparently I completed this survey at some point, and so they (Metri-Mark Inc) sent me the results. I guess there aren’t really any surprises, though the following are noteworthy:
October 29th, 2003, 2 Comments »
I can’t remember where I found this, but here are some results from a technical writer survey. I’m not crazy about how they’re presented. In fact, the questions are kind of naff. Still, I was a little surprised to see 13% of people who took the survey out of work.