Random burblings since 1999
Unlucky for some (the future lies ahead).
As they say (whoever they are).
Had hoped to not to be here when this rolled around (but it’s only a number).
Life goes on (14 years is a long time).
Always (there are many years ahead).
Without fail (life goes on).
Nothing is truly unlucky (nor is there such a thing as fate).
Things are good (and will get better).
Do not worry (the past will remain, fondly).
There are many years ahead (always).
No offer on house. The viewers didn’t get an offer on their property so we are back to square … two, I guess as they are still interested.
Anyway, off to visit the nurse today for a checkup on my blood pressure and to see if the drugs still work (and aren’t destroying my kidneys). I’m thinking my blood pressure might be a teeny tiny ickle bit affected by the whole splitting up/selling house thing…
Still, life goes on. Tonight I’m at an ISTC area group meeting, tomorrow night marks the return of Games Night at work, where we use the big projector and other large screens hooked up to Wiis and XBoxes to, yeah, play games. We also order pizza.
And then on Saturday it’s haircut day, I’ll also be visiting the dental hygienist then off into Glasgow later for food then to watch Scott Pilgrim vs the World! Looking forward to that.
So, life continues.
And, to be honest, aside from the house sale situation, everything is good. We can’t do anything else to make the house sell quicker so no point fretting about that, instead I’m getting out and about more and enjoying every minute.
I have an admission. I’m lazy. I work hard to get around that basic character trait but it remains there in the background, nagging away at me. Professional pride stops it influencing my work (I manage a lean, mean to-do list to keep me on track), but when it comes to things on the periphery I happily admit I’ll look for an easy, hassle-free solution if I can find one.
This has lead to me develop some little working habits which help me keep on top of the mass of information which I divert my way, largely through RSS feeds. I monitor many different feeds as I like to keep up with latest developments and discussions about our profession, it also makes it easier for me to write my monthly column – Blog News – for the ISTC Newsletter.
The workflow includes monitoring RSS feeds in Google Reader, and a web application called Instapaper which, with one click, bookmarks posts I want to read later. I then have another web application called Twitter Feed which monitors the RSS feed from Instapaper, and sends the links to my Twitter account as “retweets”. One click, gives me collation and sharing of articles and posts. Quite powerful.
Of course, at some point, there needs to be time to digest all this information and when it comes to that there have been a few interesting ideas appearing recently. These services will aggregate content by monitoring various places, and displaying the articles (links) they find in a more readable format.
In a way, Instapaper will do this, allowing you to read the text of an article without having to visit the website (a bit like Google Reader), but other services are starting to offer more graphical views, such as that provided by Paper.li.
The idea behind Paper.li is to create a ‘newspaper’ built from focussed articles. You tell it where to look for links and it does some nifty processing. Here’s one based on my Twitter account. It’s a bit basic at the moment, but has a lot of potential. I can see me using a few of these as ‘starting pages’, fire them up, get some coffee and spend a few minutes looking at intelligently collated content.
Ahhh yes, it makes perfect sense now I’ve realised what is going to happen. There is nothing I can do to stop it, so, as I have before, I’ll just go with the flow whilst the madness unfurls around me.
If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs…
We are waiting to hear if the people who viewed our house a couple of weeks ago are going to make an offer. They are waiting on an offer being made on their property and are expecting it this week.
Which, if we are lucky, will mean that by this time next week we will be agreeing moving dates and so on. All good.
That is until I realised that September is already a very busy month for me. I’m speaking at a conference in the middle of September, have several things going on at work that I can’t drop out of at this point, not to mention a few birthdays to remember (my parents both have birthdays in September). I may also be needing to find somewhere to live, pack the house into boxes, get a van and a man service to help us move, deal with the cancelling of accounts, paying off of debts and everything else that goes along with selling a house and splitting up.
Of course, it might not go that way. It might fall through. I’m trying my best not to get my hopes up.
But.
I’m fairly optimistic. Particularly given previous experiences when life has conspired to bring several things together into a mad mental stramash. But I’ve gotten through those times OK, so I’m sure this will be just the same.
So, if it does all happen, it’s fair to say that September is gonna be just a LITTLE BIT MENTAL! You have been warned.
The next ISTC West of Scotland area group meeting will take place in Glasgow on Thursday 26th August 2010, from 7.30 pm onwards. Come along to talk about latest news and trends in communication, or just to meet other communication professionals.
The event is free and open to anyone interested in technical communication, such as technical authors, information architects, internal communication professionals, report writers, marketing writers, web content writers and graphic designers.
Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.
Please forward this message on to your colleagues or anyone else who may be interested.
For more information, email westscotland_areagroup @ istc.org.uk
Are you in the UK? Are you attending the Technical Communication conference in September? If not, you really should, it’s looking like it will be an excellent conference.
The conference website is starting to gear up as well, and has posted some short interviews with some of the speakers, including yours truly. They should give you a flavour of what to expect at the sessions, many of which I’m hoping to be able to attend as well.
I’d imagine planning the sessions is one of the harder jobs when organising a conference, making sure there isn’t too much overlap and the programme this year seems to have a good balance. Certainly I think there is only one overlap with a session I would like to see that I can’t attend, but that’s because I’m presenting at the same time.
Hope to see many of you there, and remember, and this is the most important thing of all.
Mine’s a Guinness!