Apr 13, 2009 in Technology
It astounds me that a company as large as Microsoft can’t develop better help systems to accompany their products. While most people complain that Microsoft merely releases lousy products, I am one of the faithful who believe that the products are fine, but badly, poorly, confusingly, terribly supported.
Case in point: MS Word’s string Replace() function, not discussed in any official VBA reference.
Apr 04, 2009 in Technology
If you’ve tried sending me email at anytime on April 4, 2009, there is a great chance that I didn’t receive it. I screwed up. Badly. I was trying to be smart, by modifying my DNS record and Host (A) settings to increase my privacy. However, I forgot to set up the MX record. To fix this will take more trouble than it’s worth, so I have restored my original DNS settings.
While the new settings are happily propagating the Internet, if you need to reach me, use the phone, facebook, or twitter. I will test the server settings later tonight, but I probably won’t be checking email at least until Monday.
Feb 25, 2009 in Productivity
Since last week I’ve been receiving upwards of 300 spam comments a day. I somehow made it onto the Internet radar, which is proving to be a mixed blessing. A pet peeve of mine is seeing well known, high profile blogs with spam comments, as if the owner doesn’t care about the quality of their community, only the amount of comments against their posts. For this reason alone I will continue to moderate comments against my blog. Readers who comment regularly will have their comments approved automatically from their third comment onward, unless their comment matches other triggers.
Dec 02, 2008 in Personality, Productivity, Technology
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.
Oct 09, 2008 in Creativity, Productivity, Technology
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!”
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