running with paper

Why is there no search on this site. Must have a word with the management.

Well, I they and I finally updated Lexulous. It ran faster, crashed less. But I’ve pulled back on my online gaming; it’s not free if you’re paying with your data. And I’m just not interested in pl/paying that way.

Still Facebookering, still bitching backseat designing it about it, but there’s only so much one annoyed user can do about it. I’ve had some conversations about it, and feel the users will make themselves heard if they do anything much more egregious than what they’ve done. But if you don’t want something all over the internet, for crying out loud don’t put it there.

One of the most mind numbing things to do as a technical writer or information developer or executive information producer is to fix something that’s broken. Try this tag. Nope, that didn’t fix it. Try that code. Nope, didn’t fix it.

But sometimes you have to do it to fix what went wrong. A bullet in an unordered list starting in the middle of the page. Strange characters (on the page, too, not just asking for unusual things).

Somewhere in there, we throw our hands up and say, “Enough!” We implement standards. We go through templates, line by line, not just to make them look alike, but act alike. Then, when someday we have to change all the instances of “calulator” to “calculation device of DOOM”, it’s easy.

You do not get your blue text. Deal. Er, I mean:

Thanks so much for your email. While we appreciate the effort you’ve put into your suggestion, it would fail against the rules our system has in place to validate the code of the documents we publish.

I’m afraid we cannot honor your request to make your tips blue.

Which is good when you’re in a position of some power; not necessarily in level at a company, but in showing your competency and your reasoning – you don’t hate the color blue, you may or may not think the suggestion is completely useless or ridiculous, or that the person suggesting it should stick to his or her own knitting, but you have to usually say so and why.

But sometimes, I find, it’s also good to not have to be the one to say “We aren’t going to break our rules for you,” but it’s helpful to know how.

I love that phrase. Certain phrases tickle or annoy me – I remember long ago wanting to eradicate the phrase “a folder named people” simply because it bothered me. And amusement at the succinctly irrationality of computer networks indicated simply by “Printers go offline at random.” And they do. Boy do they.

But that’s what I need to do around here, too. Firm up my writing, figure out what this blog is going to be, whether I bitch about Lexulous or Face-friggin-book or writing in general. If I do make this my art and creative blog, or not. I don’t know.

The face lift, styling, may just wait for WP 3.0. Or something.

Stay tuned.

But hope you enjoyed Choose Privacy Week. Funny how it’s got that blue and orange thing going on – a popular color scheme when you need to post-production fiddle with your video. The blue looks suspiciously like FaceBook blue (and their little font, too). A whole week devoted to choosing one’s privacy and I missed it. Ah well.

Reading suggestions: The Unwanted Gaze and Little Brother.

Speaking of Cory Doctrow, I need to take up this idea of his, perhaps – instead of just wearing a true tinfoil hat …

Here, that is.

Augh on the teaching myself technology. At least now it’s easier than when I first put on my gold nametag and temped all those years ago. Then I had to read books without the software to play with, then sit at the agency all day, showing my proficiency.

Now I have to learn as I go, but I have helpful YouTube videos to help.

It’s been quiet around here lately; busy with family and year-end, and pulling together freelance work out in the wilds of the internet.

Today I started, again, installing Drupal on a customer site. I’d installed it a few times before, but this was a planned total new installation. Moving to 6.15, getting the site out of beta into release shape, the whole nine yards.

Usually I check drupal.org first, looking for updates – this time I knew from a friend that 6.15 was out and included a number of security updates. Fine by me: most of what I’d done shouldn’t be affected by any changes. Install, move the content over to the new database, then get the final touches, such as hiding the User Login fields, live.

Installation – smooth. Modules – uploaded. Themes – migrated. Content – moved and updated. User Login fields – not doing what I want. Okay, fine. Dr Google to the rescue. Most sites say the same thing as drupal.org – turn off the block and access it by typing in sitename.com/username. Not my first choice on a site that is publishing user names right and left, but I’ll try it. After all, it is in the official documentation, it must be right!

Not really. I don’t know if it was this fix or an earlier fix, but you can’t do that in Drupal 6 any more, I think. As of this writing, drupal.org is down for maintenance. So I fiddled in another direction, and that seems to have solved the issue.

1. First, make sure you are logged in to your site as an administrator. I have no idea how to do this if you’ve lost your login fields already – sorry.
2. Create a new Page, name it something you can remember, such as yourspecialPage. Publish it, but do not put it on the front page.
3. Edit the visibility of the login block such that it appears only on that new Page by selecting the page visibility option to show the page only on yourspecialPage (no leading or trailing slashes).

Now your login block only appears on sitename.com/yourspecialPage/.

It might not be a code bug, but rather a security feature – so, then simply a doc bug. Either way, nice to exercise those muscles again.

Back in my customer service days, we had a trophy the office manager had made up of an old sports trophy, a nice red triangular rock, and googly eyes from the craft store. It was a silly award, given for good ideas in later or mockingly to mind-numbingly clueless customers, vendors, or ourselves …

I’ve been going through my papers for year-end, and came across a notebook I kept in my corporate days, listing the bug reports and software improvements I’d recommended over the previous year. I was aiming for one a week for a year but didn’t quite make my goal. I wonder if they took up any of the suggestions, or if any were in the pipeline and are now out there (even if I didn’t come up with it first).

And it’s funny; that’s why I started in this business – not liking some of the bugs and usability annoyances of software. Wanting to do something about it, and getting there by suggesting fixes and writing down what needed to be worked around, teaching my co-workers back in the day to use *NIX based software on terminals and in emulation environments.

Happy New Year, happy bug and feature hunting!

If you search for tips on improving slide decks and presentations, you usually find the same sort of tips. Keep it short. Keep it uncluttered. Stick with a palette from the company/software/package. Have your notes ready, know your deck cold, be able to do without it.

Very few seem to focus on a couple of problems I see over and over again, and I thought I’d try to address them here.

Lose the pastels. Light, bright colors that are in the same range are rather useless on screen. They print great in your color hand outs, they look nice on your screen, but across the room, they won’t show up well. And as a black and white print out, they’ll be useless shades of grey.

Don’t assume your audience has 100% color vision. A number of colleagues, including a few at recent classes and seminars, are color blind in some way. Use more than color to show your varied items: numbers, letters, arrows, or other keying information. Not sure how your colors look? Try this tool I found while searching for the answer to another client problem. (I’ve spoken to the creator about making it a more user-friendly tool – stay tuned.)

Double, even triple decking. Yes, it can be a lot of work – especially if you’re making changes up until the last minute. But you likely need to have more than one set of slides for your presentation.

One black and white set that will photocopy and distribute well.

One dark-room deck, usually with a white background.

One reversed deck a dark background with white text. One set of classes I took had lovely west facing windows along one side of the room, with no blinds. Morning classes were difficult, afternoon classes were blindingly painful. Other multi-purpose rooms and hey-let’s-make-it-a-lecture room rooms don’t have dimming capabilities, and you’re faced with a choice: complete dark or complete bright. Not ideal if your audience needs to take notes and weren’t prepared for a dark room.

Parallelism. Don’t make your audience remember. They can’t think that far back to twelve slides ago when you showed them Brand X and your wonderful idea. Show a before and after. Yes, it means duplication of slides in your deck because you can’t program a deck to show alternative threads, but seeing comparisons side by side is a powerful tool.

Repeat the question. Whether you’re live, recording, in a small group or large, repeat the question. This ensures you understand the question, the questioner knows you understand it, and that embarrassed guy in the back who had to silence ABBA right in the middle of Dancing Queen gets the question, as well.

Record yourself. Do this for yourself, with a test audience, and, if it won’t interfere with the final presentation, during the final presentation. Some times, despite the best efforts of a part-time cobbled-together A/V system, some of the information on the video will be dropped on the audio. Use these to remove uhs, uhms, and buts, or to capture questions from the test audiences to incorporate into later drafts. Or to provide transcripts (value-add!) to your presentation clients. Don’t record yourself using the presentation laptop – unless you’ve tested it to ensure you’re not overloading your system.

Most of the lectures, classes, and seminars I’ve attended lately were stellar. Great information, well laid out, but with a few problems beyond and within their control. It’s not just about giving information people can use, it’s about giving it in a usable, relatable, retainable format.

Happy presenting!

Gah. I don’t even want to get into it. The “update” of Lexulous downgraded me to 1.2 from 1.3.

Still crashes. Still requires multiple clicks to play:

1. Place tiles.
2. Click Play.
3. Click to get rid of the “ensure you are connected to the internet” message.
4. Click Play. Hope the application doesn’t crash.

I’m not particularly happy about it, but I should have been watching during the download to avoid getting downgraded.

Lexulous as a service has been having troubles, lately, too. I’ve had several of my friends’ names disappear from the Facebook site – they are changed to “Facebook User” and their user numbers are displayed in-game.

Sure, it’s annoying. But the problem that’s worse is that these “blank” names cause the software to crash on the iPhone. The application simply closes. While playing a string of games, I can’t play my tiles and click Next – the application exits if it hits a blank player. So I’ve got to go backwards to the game list, and skip my neglected “blank” friends.

I hope Lexulous 1.4 is coming soon. I’ve written them offering to be a beta tester and asking about the expected release date of 1.4, but they don’t have information to give me, nor do they seem to require outside beta testers.