Year: 2007

bookmark_borderOn switching

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I received my MacBook some weeks ago, but decided not to post immediately and try to get a better feel for both the new hardware and operating system before posting my thoughts. What follows has been written up over the period of a few weeks.

It’s official. I am now cool. I must be because Matt said so, in a roundabout way admittedly, and in case you have no earthly idea what I’m blithering on about now, I’ll first refer you to this post, and then get to the point and confirm that yes, I am now the owner of a shiny white MacBook. I am cool.

As is my wont, I had spent some time researching, reading articles written by those who had ‘switched’, and compiling a small collection of free applications that I figured I’d need at some point. So, with several PDFs, a folder of software, and several AVI files (for watching on the plane), I was all set.

There are a myriad of articles and blog posts written about switching from Windows to OSX, and I’m not going to add to them, instead I’m going to attempt to give you how I feel about becoming the owner of a Mac, because that’s what it’s really about, isn’t it?
Continue reading “On switching”

bookmark_borderOn commenting

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A couple of weeks ago I asked if everyone who visited my site would leave a comment, and quite a few of you did. Thanks to you all, even the cheeky ones who decided to buck the trend and email me. It was all quite overwhelming and lovely and.. well.. ta! I do appreciate you taking the time to both visit and comment.

When I wrote that post I knew in the back of my mind that every blog goes through a lull, as does every blog reader, but I was genuinely curious to see who responded. It wasn’t JUST about stroking my ego, honest.

As ever some of you posted some very insightful comments and with some consideration I’ll admit that it was incredibly cheeky of me to “call you out” when my own commenting ratio has been slowly plummeting for some months now, but that was another reason for the post, could I ‘force’ people to comment? (guilt, what a wonderful tool).

There does seem to be a consensus though, and this is backed by my increasing use of Google Reader to read other blogs (on that note it’s very much a case of “if you don’t have an RSS feed, you ain’t getting read”), that we read too many blogs to be able to keep up. It’s hard enough reading the damn things, without having to visit each and every one to add a comment, presuming that you are moved to do so at all.

Is this the demise of blogging? No, I don’t think so, but I do wonder if it’s shifting from being a discussion or conversation, to being an open window or voyeuristic opportunity. You’ll happily stand there for days on end, soaking up the events and words as you peer in, only responding if prompted. No?

I guess it’s one of those things that ‘depends’ (ok ok EVERYTHING ‘depends’ but bear with me) on the number of blogs you try and keep up with. Beyond a certain point the basic logistics of commenting becomes too hard so you just stop trying to comment at all. “I suspect that people are reading more blogs than they used to, which leaves them with less time to comment. Which is a shame.”

And it is a shame, after all, it’s not very fair if you only comment on certain blogs but not others. I do find myself looking at my ‘blogroll’ and trying to remember who I last commented on, and whether I should ‘spread my comments’ around like they are rationed or something. Then I give myself a shake and remind myself that this is a hobby and certainly no-one will be offended if I don’t comment on their site as often as I do on others, right?? Ohh but I do hate to offend… and so on and so forth.

Thinking about it, this internal dialogue may be the REAL reason I don’t comment on as many blogs as I used to, “I don’t leave comments anywhere anymore. I’m shit at it. Busy things – sorry. Do read everything on GoogleReader though. But I suppose that doesn’t count. Boo.”

“Do you leave comments as much as you used to?” Is a valid question (although it’s “as many” not “as much”) and the answer is no. How can I? I’m far too busy to read AND comment, sheesh.

Perhaps the way that comments work is to blame then, after all if their primary aim is to create and further ‘conversations’ then surely it should be much easier to see what has been said, how far along the debate has been moved, before you delve in to add your own opinion. Or perhaps that is a little too grandiose a view of the content of most blogs, the ones I read anyway.

Ultimately I’ve reached the point, actually I reached this point sometime last year, where I don’t really care what my readership stats are, nor do I care if they are new people or the old faithfuls who’ll return here just because I’ve posted something (bless, they don’t get out often). I know people are visiting, and I understand why comments are down, and yes I’m taking the ‘summer lull’ into consideration.

My own habits have changed, my approach to this blog, and others is different today and it will be different tomorrow. The fun part is trying to figure out where it’s going to go next. Is twitter setting a new ‘micropost’ standard that blogs will head towards, or will it allow us to be free to write longer posts? Will comments die and discussions end? Or will we continue to observe and share, collaborate and discuss and reach the utopia some think this part of the interweb holds? Have I started wittering on and should stop drinking so much coffee first thing in the morning?

As the bloke with the funny accent who does the voice-overs for Big Brother says: “You decide”.

bookmark_borderSkill Set

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Without meaning to I seem to have taken some inspiration from this post, whilst I’m not directly offering a counterpoint, it’s worth a read.

~

Every trade or profession has a skill set, a unique set of talents that make one role different from another. For most people in the IT industry we all have some amount of ‘business-led’ skills such as time management, a little project management perhaps, and so on.

As a profession, Technical Communications covers a wide range of skills and some people, depending on their role or the company the work for, can end up being a jack of all trades (master of some?). However, there are some skills that are easily identifiable as being part of our core job and apply to most, if not all, technical writing positions, for example:

  • Writing
  • Editing
  • Indexing

After that we can look to other areas in which some technical writers dabble, either because of company need or personal curiosity, such as:

  • Graphic design
  • QA/Testing
  • Coding
  • Usability
  • Information Architecture

All of these skills are professions in their own right, and whilst I would never suggest that a technical writer could replace like for like, we do tend to inherit a few additional skills as we bumble along. The specifics and amount vary from person to person, situation to situation, and whilst that means that no two jobs are the same it does present a small quandary.

How do we come up with a generic job description for our profession?

Even if I was to limit the scope of that question to my own personal experience, having worked in 5 different software companies with each having a slightly different view of what my role should be (and with each role being developed in a different way once I had joined the company), it’s still hard to get a single, generic, job description.

This all sparks another question, why do we need a generic job description for our profession?

Well put it this way. A software developer will have a set of skills, but I’d warrant that their list of core skills far outweights the list of their secondary skills. There is an understanding that a software developer will know certain things, and that list is far longer than that of a technical writer yet we have the potential to bring so much more than ‘just writing’ to a company.

To help publicise our capabilities, and the benefits of having a dedicated technical writing team within your company, a generic job description is an ideal starting point to make sure the hiring managers of the world know what we CAN do, if given half a chance.

I know that a generic job description will never match any one role, but I imagine it like a pie chart, with each slice (skill) growing or shrinking to meet the job specification. But before we can bake that pie we need a full list of ingredients.

So, what have I missed? What other roles and skills do you bring with you to a company? Let us build our generic technical writer, we can call her Tina… (or maybe not)

bookmark_borderWhat time is it?

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A question for any readers from the U.S.A. that are in the audience.

I have a question about the American education curriculum … I’m fighting the urge to suggest that’s an oxymoron, but only because it’s be a bit cheeky of someone from the ‘worst small country‘ in Western Europe, a certain case of the pot calling the kettle an uneducated and unwashed boiling implement.

I digress, quite often as it happens and it usually ends up with me trying to figure out how best to punctuate such digressions. Should I move them to their own paragraph, or perhaps enclosing them in parenthesis? Dashes maybe? Or ellipses? (which are grammatically incorrect I know but we are more about style than substance here). Ahh yes, the joys of the English language are many and manifest themselves constantly, no wonder it’s so bloody hard to learn comprehensively (do they still have comprehensive schools or do I mean ‘completely’? See, I’m doing it again!). Now, where was I?

Ohh yes, can any of my esteemed American readers confirm whether or not they are taught ‘timezones’ at school?

An example, if I’m ‘attending’ a webinar or some kind of online event or meeting, it is invariably with American colleagues and they invariably set the time using a timezone in America. Now, coming from a country which only uses one, this continues to baffle.

PST, EDT, MST… none of which seem tied to a city or state and leave me flummoxed and late… or early… depends.

Apparently, to use one of my examples above, MST equates to “Mountain Standard Time”. What the HELL does that mean? Are your mountains so high that the timezone at the top is different to that at the bottom, thus defying the very premise of establishing timezones based on longitude?

Does this confuse other Americans? Do you too have to check your time zone abbreviations or do you mostly know the different zones in your country?

And whilst we are on the topic, can anyone tell me what happened to GMT, when did it become UTC? What bloody timezone is that!! Honestly, it’s a wonder that I get to work on time… although I guess I could use timezones to my advantage, I mean, as the old saying goes, “it’s always beer o’clock somewhere on the planet!”.

What timezone are you in?

Post at 10.26 am (GMT). Or should that be 1026 GMT… UTC?? AARGH!

bookmark_borderA tale of woe

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Bit old this but it’s been sitting unpublished and getting lonely…

OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, it’s more a rant and a moan, than a story of distress.

The tale begins several weeks ago when I ordered my MacBook, with the hope that, by the time it was built and delivered, we would have been to Spain and back. I happily meandered along on that basis until a random check of the order status raised my hopes that it might appear the day before we flew out, and the Monday before we flew out I confirmed with TNT that it would be at their Linwood depot on the Thursday, the day before we headed off.

I had arranged for the delivery to be made to my office, to make sure there would be someone there to sign for it, and so having phoned the courier in the morning to confirm that it was on the van, I spent the Thursday dotting about doing last minute bits and bobs, with the plan being to swing past the office (which is on the far side of Glasgow from where I live) and pick up the MacBook before heading out for dinner with my mates.

Of course the courier, TNT, had other ideas.

Now the conversation I had with the Linwood depot was quite straightforward. On the advice of my wife, who deals with couriers every day (and who had high praise for TNT), I phoned them first thing on the Thursday morning to confirm that my ‘package’ was on a van to be delivered, and was told that yes it was and the lovely lady from the depot even confirmed the address “just to make sure”.

So I’m sure you can imagine that I was, and please let me pause to choose my words carefully… COMPLETELY FUCKED OFF when, having arrived in the office, all I received from our receptionists when I enquired to the whereabouts of my package, were quizzically blank looks.

Straight on the phone to the depot and I was told it would be delivered before 5.30pm and as it was only 5.10, it should be with me within the next 20 minutes. With a sigh, I grabbed a coffee and the paper, and sat down to wait. I gave them until 5.35pm before phoning back and after navigating through their call system I managed to get to speak to a real person, who quite happily confirmed that my package was right there in the deport, waiting for me to pick it up.

Yup, it was in the depot where it had been ALL FUCKING DAY!!! A depot which, due to the mass of roadworks on both the local roads and nearby section of the M8, would have been a damn sight easier to get to than my office and which I could have visited in the mid-afternoon, before the rush hour traffic kicked in.

And breeeaaatthhh.

Anyway, that’s in the past now and the main thing was, after all that hassle, that I would have the MacBook to take with me to Spain. And we did, and it was pretty damn good to sit on the plane and watch an episode of House, even if I did forget myself at one point and really did LOL..

bookmark_borderSite note

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The domain www.gordonmclean.co.uk no longer points at this site.

There is a holding page there for now, and it won’t ever be much more than that, a place to get information about me, a URL I can use to link to without direct fear of dumping people straight into this blog. It will be expanded soon but I’ve got a couple of other sites to take care of first…

And yes, I realise that the people who were still going to gordonmclean.co.uk and letting the redirect bring them here won’t see this message until after the fact but… well, you were warned!