running with paper

As a writer, font fondling annoys the heck out of me. Give me a Helvetica, or Lucinda, or Times New Roman, or even Courier. That’s what I started out with (okay, not Helvetica) on my typewriters back in the day.

If I needed emphasis, I used character symbols or swapped out the daisy wheel on my Brother typewriter, or, as is now taboo in interwebby land, USED CAPITAL LETTERS or Cap Typing To Make My Point.

But only when necessary. I let my writing speak for itself (including one story I wrote as a tween that started nearly every word with the letter “T”).

As a designer, I was all about the Cool Fonting^TM. I drew my own letters (badly) and stripped them down to the barest pixels possible at web time, but back in the bad old days of dial-up download, that was a pretty slow solution, too. And I’m not a fantastic graphic artist, so things were even worse.

Putting a specialized font on a website was a bad idea, too – there was no way to fall back if a browser couldn’t handle it. But now? When web pages can or should be more artsy and you don’t want to force someone into frames or Flash? Enter TypeKit. It looks as though I’ll be able to pretty up my non-bland blog (this one is plain on purpose and won’t change) with fancy fonts that help convey the feeling and look I want to express. And people with a slower connection or older browser can skip it.

Although, being the grump I am, I do worry that this will turn the rest of the web into MySpace – so I hope, unlike some of the latest iPhone features, I can at least have the option to turn it off. Maybe I’ll build a greasemonkey app called “Turn off the Stupid”.

Several of my friends get quite nostalgic about the song Shaving Cream … it was a great way to sing and almost cuss while skating safely on the edge of the profanities we weren’t supposed to know as kids. I’m indoctrinating the next generation, but there’s enough real cussing out there (especially now that it’s being proven good for you!) that Shaving Cream hasn’t got the bite it did in my time. And when I have to explain to them what shaving cream is, well, it violates the third rule of good joke telling.

“Bleeping” is more common now on television than it was in my youth; even more common are alternate angle shots and redubbed dialogue which have improved somewhat; with the editing taking place on a hit-or-miss level in captioning.

Some shows have even taken it to parody level, such as South Park and Arrested Development, but it turns out they have nothing on Netflix. One of my favorite new toys is the Roku (still needs work but is a basic entertainment tool) and the newly-expanded selection available from Netflix through our DSL connection.
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I went to my first digital “meetup” in gosh – 1992? Meeting folks from a local Bulletin Board and hanging out at a burger joint. Fourteen years later, my employer issued their first “blogging guidelines” and I stopped working so hard to keep my online and offline worlds apart. But I still had a small wall there; careful about the information I shared online and the connections made (mostly).

Then late last year, I finally joined Facebook. I’d tried Friendster, and Orkut, and Plaxo and even LinkedIn. But not MySpace – it hurts.

I held off on Facebook because people weren’t there at first, and because it was still “too open”. And even with privacy updates, just being there got you plugged into applications that your friends chose to use – not you chose – that your friend chose. And I didn’t like that. It was hard to “opt out”, unless you simply stayed away. Continue Reading »

Googler? Googlite? Googy?

This is a “help me” post disguised as a user interaction review .

Was very happy to hear about the Chrome OS. The browser name and image icon make so much more sense now.

But this is more about Google Voice. I got an invite! To my M account, which forwards to my A account. And I clicked on the link and it told me to log in. Fine. I logged in.

And got a page that says “Invalid Link.” And nothing else. No way to recover, no way to go back, no way to ask for help. I figured the error was logging in through my A account in haste, so I logged in again, using my M account.

“Invalid Link.”

Someone please help! I want to use Google Voice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was digging through my “to blog about” pile and found this from last November …

The three o-clock blahs hit me hard the other day. I don’t handle the shortening days well, and my sleep had been disturbed by an allergy attack that kept trying to turn from mere sniffle and headache to the blinding pain of a migraine.

I headed into the communal kitchen to beseech the snack machine gods for a bite to eat; perk me out of the blahs. Nearby stood a co-worker, and in the course of my attempting to explain that it was three-o-clock, the milk-and-cookies hour, I glanced at the watch I’d hurriedly grabbed at a local discount store and realized that my wrist watch has no three.

Reminds me of a comic who had an irregular phone and calendar. My calendar has no Tuesdays, he explained. I would have called you but my phone has no five.

And here I am, in his very predicament. My watch has no three. In other ways it is an unremarkable Timex Water-Resistant Indiglo date and time watch with an inexpensive leather strap. Ran me under $30 at a local discount store.

But if this means no more milk-and-cookies-hour, it’s time for it to go. On the other hand, if it means I won’t be woken by a sick kid, pet, spouse, or neighbor, perhaps I should sell it to the highest bidder ….

So I received another new spam mail at myrealname@realdomain.tld – not unusual. I and my family get such a massive ton of spam at our email addresses at realdomain.tld that we hardly even use them anymore (and yes, sibs, I will nuke and reset things soon!).

But this spam was unusual: it got through Gmail’s spam filters, which are pretty darn good. I read the first line, clicked the “PHISHING!” button* Gmail has, and forgot about it.

Then I got it AGAIN. This time, sent to realnaem@realdomain.tld, my other email address.

Amusing in two ways:

1. It was sent to, and only to, my siblings at their correct realname addresses.
2. It was sent from (apparently) one of my real name siblings. Well, at least seemingly from his address – we called him lots of names growing up, but Brittaney wasn’t one of them.
3. It was sent from FIVE MINUTES IN THE FUTURE.

Forget getting through my layers of spam-filters; I wanna live where it’s five minutes from now. I don’t think I can reach the Satellite of Love from there, but maybe I can live in the Mezzanine of Thinks You’re Kinda Cute and watch bad YouTube clips.

*yes, I know it’s not a button, it’s a link. And it’s gone now. I miss the PHISHING! link so …

First it was prepostions. A morning read of my local paper informed me that my teachers had been wrong about the whole “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule. The link above seems to indicate people have rallied against that rule for quite a bit longer than I or my teachers have been alive.

Now, it’s the “i before e” rhyme … gack. My kids are right – English is such a weird language. But it’s fun to learn, and explore with exploding young brains. Not just in the rules of the language, but in the way their little brains wrap around the rules.

But there it is; “I before E, except after C”; most people remember only that bit. I recall the second part; “or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh” – but the last part is new to me: “; and except seize and seizure and also leisure, weird, height, and either, forfeit, and neither.”

The author of that last page says the rule covers “most” cases; but only if you remember the whole thing, I expect, or grammarians wouldn’t be taking the discard of this rhyme under consideration.

Then again, one less thing to teach/unteach the next generation. I’ll dig up some of my old favorites though, like “Her first nurse works early …”, maybe work out rules for young punsters, and work on teaching them more fun with homonyms.

I’ve been doing a lot of soulsearching lately.

I’ve made the transition from full-time writer to part-time writer (and am working going back to full-time or something full-time), and the experience has really made me think.

What is a technical writer? A glorified typist? A precise troubleshooter? An information developer?

How can these skills translate into other positions within an organization? Systems Analyst? Business Analyst? Programmer (with some classes under my belt)? User Interface designer? Courseware Developer?

When I look at my resume from ten years ago or so, I want to laugh so hard I cry. I was a brave little typist back then, with some skill in figuring stuff out and putting it to paper for other people. And I met a lot of people, and picked up a lot of skills. It’s been a heck of a decade since I threw myself out there with a few years of self-directed experience on a resume that didn’t quite fill one page.

Thanks to the friends and colleagues I’ve met along the way.

I have changed and grown, a lot. But in dealing with a student-oriented software program (I’m back in school and all classes require me to manage my courses and work within a software dashboard) I’ve learned something that’s remained the same for me for well over two decades now. I’ve never really met an interface that I really really liked. I need to stay in the business and keep pushing improvements. I may never get to “totally happy” but I’ll stick with “happy enough for this release”.

That seriously was one of the questions at an interview session I had recently. “What really drives you to be a technical writer? What makes you get up and say I want to do some technical writing today?” At the time I thought it was a silly question (sorry, Brian), because I didn’t have the words beyond, “I like teaching and sharing” which at the time sounded rather weak. And still does. Paying the mortgage isn’t too smooth, either, but I was smart enough to not bring that one up.

It is true, though – I’ve never met an interface I really liked. I like to tinker, and hopefully, improve them. That’s why I like information development and all the baggage that goes with it.

I’d be perfectly happy running a small bookstore or doing some other non-writing, non-software or non-hardware job — but you bet in my spare time I’d be doing that kind of tinkering anyway.

I heart closed captioning. Live captioning can be hilarious, with interesting interpretations of names and places (don’t they have a script to work from?).

Closed captioning hides other gems, as well. Names of songs, or types of music. Watching reruns of WKRP or Quantum Leap are a hoot – you get the name of the song originally paired with the episode instead of the bland filler replacement music. Or entirely different conversations – little bits of drama or reaction lost in the shuffle.

What I don’t get, however, is why some closed captioning, the kind that the movie producers put directly on screen (access this option through a DVD menu rather than your TV menu), are so abbreviated. They leave out large chunks of dialog, subtleties that really can wreck a scene. Do they think we can’t read fast enough? Does some captioner think they’re improving the story?

Does anyone work in the industry? Help a curious soul out!

I’ve been looking at the Facebook client for the iPhone. A couple of things annoy me, a few things are good. Better than not having Facebook at all when you’re stuck somewhere and need to send or get information, but a few tweaks can make it amazing.

But that’s for another day.

Today, I come to praise Facebook. I’m still learning my way around, but it’s got a few nice features. They’re updating their privacy options and such; we’ll see if that’s an improvement. I resisted joining for so long because there wasn’t a really decent, compact privacy policy. Add an application and there’s access to a lot more than is really needed. But like I said, maybe there are improvements.

But someone programmed their update function well. Sure, any coder can put a period at the end of a sentence if the user leaves it off. But my last update ended in quotes – sans punctuation. The code inserted the period in the right place. Before the end quote, instead of after it.

I don’t know why we do it this way, or our parent (parent? cousin?) language in the UK does it their own way, but I suppose one punctuation rule is easier to program than half a dozen or more.

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Facebook’s new interface loses this functionality. Hopefully it means they can improve the iPhone interface.