Tony Chung: Creative Communications

Christmas time is fast approaching. Surely you have those one or two finicky family members who are just impossible to shop for. Allow me to share a secret to my Christmas shopping that has alleviated much of the pressure, and restored the sense of peace to what is often the most dreaded experience at this time of year.

My secret is found in our family’s running joke: “What do you get for the one who has everything?”

The answer:”BATTERIES!”

So I says to my wife, “you know, I’d really like to work as an independent contractor for awhile and really get to see the world.” The following day, my manager told me that they’d lost my contract as a technical writer. I wanted to say, “Would you like me to help you find it?” Instead I played it cool. “Great! Lots of time for blogging.” As I wrote my last full post on November 6, obviously I didn’t spend as much time blogging as I thought. What did I do instead? It couldn’t have been because I ran out of things to say.

Forgive me Father, for I have not yet sinned—but just might. After looking at specs for laptop computers yet again, I am facing another bout of gear lust. We all know that lust is one of the seven deadly sins. The virtual ink is not even dry on my last blog post, yet already the urge is so strong I need to confess my desires right away.

To think: all I was looking for was a Windows-compatible laptop/notebook computer with a full-size 6-pin Firewire (IEEE1394) port and graphics card with dedicated RAM. The machines below don’t have Firewire. They don’t have dedicated graphics hardware. But you must admit, they are cool. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these videos should be just over the top.

I have only one more week on my current contract. My final responsibility is to finish off this über cool web view of one of our documentation products, which will be integrated as an output stream from the newly-installed XDocs XML content management system. The best part about technical communication is that I get paid to write all day, and when I need a break, I can fix the CSS for an embedded help system or hack some JavaScript. My Technical Communication department manager gave me permission to showcase the web output with obfuscated text in my portfolio, so be on the lookout for samples in the near future.

For the last month I’ve been going nuts trying to hack the ExtJS javascript application framework, recommended by the Technical Adviser from the company’s Web Services department. I have no problem applying different plugins to my project. However, when I try to add custom behaviours to the objects, I get that little red Firebug that shows me the hand and says “not so fast, cowboy!”

On September 16, RJ Jácquez, Senior Product Evangelist for the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, presented a remote meeting for the Society for Technical Communication Canada West Coast chapter. His involvement actually went above and beyond a mere sales pitch. RJ hosted the entire meeting through Acrobat Connect Pro, which combined a live video feed from our meeting location, prerecorded audio and video files stored on the Connect server, and his own presentation about the enhancements to the Adobe Technical Communication Suite for version 1.3. As part of the A/V team I was stoked to try out this technology. I wrote an article about our rehearsal for Coast Lines, the newsletter of the STC Canada West Coast chapter.

As part of my volunteer activity for the Society for Technical Communication – Canada West Coast chapter, I offered to evaluate some streaming video technology we may use to kick off our program meeting in September. Since the spring of 2008, we branded ourselves as a virtual chapter, and shifted our focus from face-to-face meetings to online communities like a forum and wiki attached to our web site. One area we had yet to try was the notion of live video streaming. You can’t get more virtual than live video. On a recommendation from Bruce Sharpe, I explored ustream.tv tonight, and I got hooked. In 20 minutes I joined ustream.tv, set up a channel, and broadcast my first video from a webcam connected to my laptop. I even recorded a clip, if you’d care to look….

Thanks to today’s email from Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, my favourite marriage and family specialists, I learned of a new movie being released by the creators of Facing the Giants. I have to warn you. I’m a sucker for a good love story, so I cried just watching the trailer.