bookmark_borderFinished!



Murrayfield Stadium, originally uploaded by Gordon.

In total I’ve raised over £850, so thank you to everyone who donated.

I quite enjoyed myself, thankfully the weather held and I almost managed it in my target of 4 hours (4hrs 7mins in total).

Add in cycling to and from Glasgow Green and I covered 69 miles on Sunday, no wonder my legs are a bit sore!

Will I do it next year… yeah.. maybe.

bookmark_borderWhen life is good

I tend to forget about this little blog, more and more frequently I’m too caught up in the ‘now’ of things happening. Twitter is useful in that respect as it’s less daunting to use to capture a passing thought, no pressure to flesh it out into a longer blog post.

Cycling is going well, the ‘big’ cycle is on Sunday and I’m all prepared I think (bike is getting serviced tomorrow to make sure).

Love life is going well. Saying no more on that, but my face hurts from ALL THE GRINNING LIKE A LOON!

Work is going.. well it’s ok. Which is as good as being good!

So, I’m happy.

And if you are very lucky, you might get another scintillating blog post next week!

bookmark_borderNext West of Scotland Area Group meeting

The next ISTC technical communicators’ meeting in Glasgow will take place on Thursday 13th October 2011, from 7.30 pm onwards.

As it’s happening just after the conference, I will be presenting a (short) report from the Technical Communication UK 2011 conference. 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.

bookmark_borderOn yer bike!

At the start of Cycle Glasgow 2011, originally uploaded by Gordon.

http://www.justgiving.com/gordonmclean

Last year I agreed to take part in the Glasgow to Edinburgh cycle (mostly because my mate was nagging me to do it). I didn’t own a bike but it sounded fun.

Then, early this year as you all know, my Mum had a stroke. She’s been through a life changing experience and is battling through the other side. It has changed her life, my Dad’s life (himself a heart attack survivor) and made me realise that you only get one shot at this thing called life.

Your donation will help further the research in these areas, lessen the risk for us all, and better support the survivors, people like my Mum and Dad.

I’m 60% of the way towards my target, you can help! http://www.justgiving.com/gordonmclean

The cycle takes place on the 11th September and, because I’m a big geek, I’ve setup a separate Twitter account which tracks my ‘training’ and will update throughout the cycle in September.

bookmark_borderQuick wins

At work I have a laptop running Windows 7 and every lunchtime, as I lunch away from my desk, I lock the machine.

Except what I should do is pause iTunes, set my IM status to Away, and then lock it but I forget to do all that most days and just bash Windows+L.

However, I’ve found two small, free, applications that will now allow me to do all that with one mouse gesture, specifically it will pause iTunes, set my IM status to Away/Idle, mute the laptop speakers and turn off the screen.

Hot Corners handles the mouse gesture (and allows you set to other actions), and MonitorES handles the media player, IM and screen actions.

Simple and effective.

I do like it when things just work.

And yes, I know the Hot Corners idea is a direct lift from OSX but they wouldn’t buy me a MacBook… 🙁

bookmark_borderAlways learning

Next week the first of two new recruits joins our team. Both are graduates and whilst neither graduated from a Technical Writing based course they both have a good mix of skills, coming to the position through different routes. It’ll be a challenge for them, and a challenge for us, to integrate them to the team smoothly and successfully. I’m sure they will both do well, but to give them the best chance I’m preparing a few weeks of training for them, in various aspects of the job.

I’m trying to anticipate what they need to know, and when they need to know it, and whilst I’m very wary of letting my own experience get in the way it does mirror what they will be going through as my route into this profession was via an Electronic Engineering course, and I too had no experience in Technical Writing.

Training on our authoring tool (Author-it) is straightforward enough, and we will be mentoring each of the recruits as well so day to day questions we can handle.

We will likely use the IBM book “Developing Quality Technical Information” to provide a grounding in the basics of Technical Writing, along with an eLearning book titled Basics of Technical Writing that we purchased from CherryLeaf a few years ago.

They will have to learn how we do things, our specific processes, and learn how the overall Development team works so they understand where they fit, and they will receive a series of training exercises to complete before they take our product training course. On top of all that they will have a week long company Induction.

I’m a great believer in people learning by doing, so I’m planning a set of small tasks which will be checked and reviewed, and which will ultimately find their way into our documentation set.

Beyond that, I’ll be looking for them to ask questions, try things, make mistakes and learn from them, and then ask more questions. This industry is too varied to try and learn everything at once, and ultimately it’s down to them to decide what areas they want to push into… user experience? content design? API information? Who knows.

I do know it’s a challenge, for everyone involved, and that’s one of the things we, as a company, do best. There is a saying we have about being two feet outside your comfort zone, that’s where you learn best, that’s where you grow and start to understand your capabilities, so we will see how our recruits get on!

For me it’s doubly exciting as this is only the second time I’ve taken on graduates. I learned a lot the last time, both about how to train them and about my own foibles and attitudes to my profession so I’m brushing up my own knowledge to make sure I, and the rest of the team, give them the best change they have. In saying that, the first time I did this I was in my first ‘senior’ position, that was 10 years ago so hopefully by now I’ve gained a little bit more experience!

After all, you learn something new every day.

Have you brought a graduate into your team? Or are you involved in training or mentoring new recruits? If you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them.