Happily Imperfect October 2009

What next?

Reading time: < 1 min

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. I lay there in bed wondering why I’d woken up and as my mind started to churn I realised I was very very awake.

In flooded four things I’ve been thinking about for some time, all of which are related but I couldn’t quite make the connection. Last night I cracked it. Maybe.

I’m still thinking it through but here are the four items in question:

Single sourcing our documentation – and recent discussions with other areas of the company who could benefit from the same approach.
Company Information Strategy – a simple pyramid based model that allows everyone creating content to ‘map’ their audience appropriately and which should start to help with consistency of terminology and messaging.
Document Management – there have been some murmurings about this from a few people and it’s likely to fall into my lap.
Requirements gathering – we’ve recently rolled out a new process which should lead to better requirements for each project build.

All of these are tied together, and if planned properly can feed off each other. Naturally there is quite a lot involved with all of the above and I’ll be revisiting items one and two in the coming weeks.

Ohh and I’ve still to pull together a slide deck on “selling our services”, which involves all of the above and more. Once it’s ready, I’ll share it here.

Exciting times ahead.

October 29, 2009

NaNoWriMo? No!

Reading time: < 1 min

I’d love to.

I really would.

Every year that rolls around finds me considering it.

Every year I start to jot down notes (where do you think one man tales came from?).

Every year I visit the website, and get excited at the thought.

Every year I think, yeah I COULD do that.

Every year I think, maybe I SHOULD do that.

Every year I think, maybe that’s just what I need.

Every year I think, yes, this is the year. I will do it!

But I won’t.

Not this year.

I just don’t have the time (such a lame excuse, really).

Even if I was to promise myself to MAKE the time.

I wouldn’t.

I SHOULD.

If it really meant that much to me I would.

But I won’t.

Maybe next year.

Maybe.

Will you?

October 28, 2009

It never rains…

Reading time: < 1 min

Some time around 1am this morning there was a loud bang from downstairs when the kitchen ceiling got fed up trying to hold up a big pool of water, choosing to dump it, and several bits of the ceiling all over the kitchen below.

It seems that, after all the hassle and faffing with the cistern, there has been a leak in the bathroom. We did hear a couple of drips yesterday, but they had stopped (replaced, I presume, with a steady leak).

We mopped up, turned the water off and phoned the insurance company, they took our details and said they’d get someone to phone between 8am and 9am. Which, of course, didn’t happen. So I phoned them and was told someone would phone me soon, which they did (funny how that works) only to tell us that the guy in our area had phoned in sick, so it’ll be tomorrow before he can come out.

So we’ve got the heater on in the kitchen to dry it out as much as we can (it’s doing the job well) and just when I’d started to relax I heard a dripping noise. Yup, it looks like the flashing around the porch is leaking again, despite being replaced last year.

Frankly I’m of a mind to get all this fixed then sell this bloody place as it’s been nothing but hassle (I’d burn it down but it’s too damp). We did get this house very cheap because it needed work but this constant worrying about money is getting really really old.

October 25, 2009

Right now, at this moment

Reading time: < 1 min

I’m trying to catch up on a few bands I’ve heard mention of over the past month.

I’m pondering switching from dark maroon to blue.

I’m still faffing with Yahoo Pipes (which power this).

I’m writing up a proposal for a “community website” for a professional organisation I’m a member of (the ISTC).

I’m drafting blog posts sparked by conversations with some fellow professionals last night, one of which is “How I use Twitter”.

I’m slowly getting my gym mojo back, and quiet pleased that I’ve not put on any weight in the past two weeks (not lost any either but that’s a different story).

I’m planning ahead for the next couple of months, and wondering how to tackle some stuff in the New Year.

I’m laughing at the cat who is sleeping in a cardboard box next to me and who is snoring.

I’m remembering we are going out tonight and need to order some pizza to take with us (that was the deal, we’ll bring pizza, they provide beer).

I’m mostly daydreaming and wasting time when I should be having a quick shower and getting changed for tonight.

I’m wondering if I should even post this at all, as it’s a feeble excuse for a blog post and I had promised myself I’d do better.

Fuck it.

October 23, 2009

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Reading time: < 1 min

I’m always wary when I attend a gig by chance, having not heard any music from the artist in question. So when 10 guys bounced on stage, brass instruments reflecting the stage lights, and announced they were here to “make some motherfucking noise”… well I was even more confused.

Then they started to play and it all clicked into place.

Underpinned by heavy hiphop influenced beats (delivered from an American Euphonium), the trombones and trumpets soon picked out some … yeah.. hypnotic melodies. As the band members sway and spin in time to the music, it’s hard not to match their movements.

But the real key to their live act was the interaction with the audience, whipping us up between tracks, call outs and yells, reminding us that these guys know how to party, and when they started dropping lyrics with some slick rapping leading into and out of some of the track, the place went nuts.

Having such a hugely enthusiastic band, producing a booming, throbbing groove in such a small place is always a recipe for success, the energy was tangible and I was booging and swaying along without even realising. All too soon they were finishing up.

I picked up their CD on the way out and unfortunately the production isn’t great, losing all that booming bass, but this is a band that you DEFINITELY want to catch live, and the magic of the internets allows me to provide this video from Glastonbury this year to give you a flavour:

October 20, 2009

Dumping the manual

Reading time: 2 mins

I honestly can’t remember the last time I picked up a user manual, an honest-to-god paper book of technical documentation. Actually that’s a lie, it was just last week when i was tidying up. I picked up several user manuals and moved them to a lower shelf on my bookcase.

It’s also been a long time since I last worked for a company that produce and printed user manuals but that’s more to do with my career path than any decisions I made within those companies.

Even now whilst we have a “documentation set” comprising several different user manuals, it’s published to PDF and made available as part of the product distribution (and also online).

So why do we still maintain this view of how information should be provided?

There is a level of comfort in having a table of contents and a structure to the information available when writing technical information. It allows you to make sure all the required information is in place, but most of the research I’ve read, and most of the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard, suggests that those lovingly created table of contents are not heavily used.

The index is another area, hell it’s another profession altogether, that we spend a lot of time crafting and rightly so as it is used by many people to navigate their way through a document.

But one thing that trumps both of these methods isn’t available in printed documents but is widely available for online information. Search.

OK, so none of what I’m saying is new, or revolutionary, far from it. Those of us who have been creating online help, regardless of the format (a lot of which was before the internet was popularised), know that if there is a search option available, it will be used.

With that in mind, and this is most definitely something we will be consulting with our users about, we are toying with the idea of dumping the index and the table of contents, making sure the content has a good set of internal reference links so users (power and novice alike) can find “paths” through the information, and switching the front page to be a Google-esque search.

Luckily we can pilot this approach whilst still producing the Javahelp, PDFs and HTML (Webhelp in Author-it terms) output so we don’t completely alienate our users. It’ll be interesting to see outcome.

October 20, 2009