Jul 01, 2010 in Society
To commemorate the occasion of Canada’s 143rd birthday, I swapped out my outer space Firefox persona for a more patriotic message.
Canada Rocks Firefox Persona
Show your patriotic colours and load the theme on your own browser!
May 28, 2010 in Productivity
One of my really cool projects is to harness the collaborative CMS features of MediaWiki as a means to store comments within an HTML-based help system. I thought I’d start by implementing a forms-based entry that created wiki pages when first loaded, but after getting so far I’ve been banging my head against the wall.
Let me explain what I’ve done so far, with the hope that someone out there on teh Interweb would be able to help me out. I’ll post an update when I get it sorted out. (Sorry, I’m not posting screen shots to save time.
May 09, 2010 in Society
In the interest of time, I thought I’d share the photos I took in Dallas with the world the quickest way possible. I quickly weeded through the doubles and darkies on my disk, imported them into iPhoto, then exported them into a new Picasa album. This is my first attempt to embed a Picasa album.
Read the write up for more insight.
Feb 02, 2010 in Technology
Just a quick update today. I was browsing for Drupal resources to help me with a project, and stumbled onto this funny video. The sensitive among you will have to close your eyes at the well-placed swear words. Sorry. It was too funny for me to worry about censorship.
Drupal 7, Panels, and Hitler
Many thanks to Nick Lewis’ tell-it-like-it-is blog
Just in case you’re wondering, I’m not jumping onto the Drupal 7 bandwagon while it’s still in Alpha.
Jan 02, 2010 in Strategy
Tony Chung: Creative Communications
Several technical communicators have had a hard time reconciling the value-add proposition for renewing their membership with the Society for Technical Communication. Some have been very vocal about the society’s lack of support, lack of expertise, lack of understanding, and lack of relevance for the communications field. In blunt terms, the STC is a dinosaur, with a business and operations model that doesn’t fit the current trends. Some of the outspoken include volunteers like myself who thought we could help initiate and support change from the inside. Fortunately I am involved in the very active Society for Technical Communication – Canada West Coast Chapter, which is experiencing a new wave of volunteers who thrive on connecting within this community. As well, I participate in a couple of really experienced special interest groups, the Single Sourcing (officially), and Contractors and Independent Consulting (locally).
After the 2006 summit a fellow chapter member observed that technical communicators are expanding from the traditional plan/interview/write model into the facilitation and editing of user authored content. This exciting trend from writer to enabler has always appealed to me, because I’ve always been on the periphery of traditional technical writing. While I am technical and I love to write, I also have a passion for music and multimedia, web design and programming, graphic design and illustration, and performing. It’s been difficult finding jobs that match my level of interest in technology and my love to write. That said, I’ve found lots of work in the web development arena, and am excited at being able to harness these skills and abilities in my current job, along with writing and editing.
In this post I describe at length why the STC has me for at least another year.
Continue reading: Just renewed STC Membership for 2010 — here’s why
Jul 25, 2009 in Personality
From August 4 to the 20 I’ll be taking the family to visit my wife’s parents in Ontario. In addition to all the fun family stuff, I plan to meet up with other web developers, technical communicators, musicians, worship leaders, and social media afficionados while I’m there.
Pretty exciting stuff. Send me a private message if you have time to meet for coffee.
Continue reading: Travel planning for family fun and finanace
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.
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