I've done without a car for thirteen years. I live in a city with lots of cabs, good bus service, and plenty of sidewalks to walk on. I have friends and family which will transport heavy goods in a pinch, and if I need to get out of the city there is always the Greyhound.
But jeez, I think it's time to get a car. I hate sponging off of friends. I hate being unable to visit people in other cities. When I'm invited to do a show in Guelph, I hate forcing them to pick me up and drive me home. I hate taking the bus to Toronto.
Most importantly -- and positively -- I would love to be able to drive during the summer. I want to drive to little towns and explore without worrying that other people will be bored. I want to visit the Bruce Penninsula again. I want to see Lake Huron.
To do all of these things I need a car.
So I've started the ball rolling. My father works at a car dealership and he knows his cars, so he's scouting out a practical used vehicle. I've called an insurance company to find out how much I'll need to pay for the privilege of driving...I'll get the bad news tomorrow. I've decided that -- for the first time in my life -- I need to go into temporary debt to achieve a useful and substantial goal: geographic independence.
Hopefully this will all happen.
I need to balance this with two other desires. First off, I want to go to the 2008 Pennsylvania STC Summit in June, and though I'll be reimbursed for everything it always involves my paying upfront, out of my own pocket.
Also, while editing a new "Domestic Drag Show" in iMovie, I finally decided it would be worth it to get better (that is, ADEQUATE) video editing software. But that would require upgrading my operating system, which would ultimately require just getting a new computer. As nice as it would be to enjoy all the perks of a spiffy new iMac (not to mention the ability to make better videos, and to make them faster), I have to admit that this is hardly essential.
So the car wins.
Showing posts with label STC Summit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label STC Summit. Show all posts
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Big City Muffy in Minneapolis (May 16)
This entry is for Wednesday! To view the previous three days, see May 13th, May 14th, and May 15th.
Eating my complimentary Raisin Bran on Wednesday morning I realized the basic flaw in my trip plan: I'd decided to stay on in Minneapolis so I'd have more time to hang around with good people...but all the people I'd met at the STC Summit would be flying out on Wednesday night! Then I'd enter stage two of the trip (exploration and nightclubs) where I'd meet MORE wonderful people...then *I* would be flying away on Saturday! So instead of somehow finding more time to hang around with new friends I would be meeting twice as many people and leaving them just as quickly.
"That's obvious!" you shout. For some reason I'd assumed that other Summit people would be staying in Minneapolis like I was...but none of them seemed to be, and I had yet to meet a Summit person from Minneapolis who was under forty and bar-hopper fun.
8:30 - "Distributed Writing: A Psychology of Social Computer Practices." This was one of those periods when I had to scrounge to find an interesting presentation, but fortunately Johannes Strobel gave the perfect early morning talk: relevant, friendly, and fun. I didn't take many notes because -- once again -- the session wasn't even remotely related to my line of work, but Strobel's point seemed to fall in line with the general Summit theme of forums/wikis/social networking sites being the "new literacy" in which many of the old rules no longer apply.
Sadly this session also had the highest level of "noise comments" from the audience, who constantly asked tangential questions in order to -- basically -- talk about themselves, their blogs, and their general web behaviour. Since Strobel seemed happy to answer any question regardless of its relevance, I compiled a list of question introduction warning signs...when somebody starts a question with one of these sentence fragments, you know it's time to take a bathroom break and grab a bottle of overpriced water in the lobby:
Alright, yes, the three presenters talked about their experiences moving content from one management system to another: from an HTML website to a more sophisticated web 2.0 style, from Framemaker to some sort of XML style, etc. Since our docs department is pretty happy with our tools (and we can't even upgrade our existing software, let alone move to an entirely new content management system) I didn't find this session very interesting.
1:30 - "If You're So Smart, Why Does Your Writing Suck?" Bonus points for an enticing title, Karen A. Schriver actually pulled the session together with some relevant (and entertaining) content. Once again we were reminded not to focus ONLY on design and "good English," but Schriver took a more optimistic and proactive approach than many of the other speakers who'd touched on this theme. She told us to avoid "knowledge telling" -- fact/data dumps that use "inside language" and which overestimate the audience's familiarity with a topic -- and be more sensitive to the audience. Good tips, and something we shouldn't need to be told (but we still DO need to be told).
3:30 - Closing Session. After some tastefully short presentations we were totally overwhelmed by Ze Frank, who was exceptionally funny. Much like Jean-luc Doumont he gave some lighthearted interpretations of "low context" signs ("lock your giant baby in a suitcase") before moving into an increasingly serious examination of social network sites.
I wasn't ENTIRELY sure of his final point, but he seemed to be a bit of an apologist for trolls, saying that (like the rest of us) they just wanted to be part of the communication, and that those people behave like trolls for various reasons...reasons that didn't seem to include MY theory, which is that trolls desperately want attention but -- for whatever reason -- just do it in an antisocial way (which Frank likened to doodling genitals at a social gathering). The same way that immature kids pull pigtails because they don't know how to express themselves, or because they're jerks.
He said that, yes, social-interaction technology is evolving at an enormous rate, but humans still have the same old social needs: intimacy, jealousy, egotism, etc. I'm not sure if he ever made a distinct and final point because I wasn't taking notes, and I'm definitely paraphrasing from what I remember of his talk.
Aha, dinner. It was time to budget, and since all of the restaurants in downtown Minneapolis were INCREDIBLY expensive (and since I didn't have any food appliances in my hotel room other than the coffee maker and the ice bucket) I resigned myself to the only food & booze convenience store in the area. I always find that the cashiers and fast-food employees in America are offensively rude, but I think it might be because I'm actually NICE to them; I say "please" and "thank you" and "have a nice day," and since I don't see anybody ELSE doing this, maybe it comes across as obnoxious or condescending to them. Or maybe they're jerks. Or they think I'm a jerk.
10:00 pm - The Gay '90s: Time for fun and adventure! I found myself in the large and complicated "Gay '90s" nightclub, which was apparently dead for even an average Wednesday night. A sad and lonely go-go dancer -- apparently wearing a diaper -- gyrated in a cage for an empty bar. The drag show upstairs was slightly better attended, and I found myself able to WATCH an excellent show without actually needing to PARTICIPATE.
After "Maurice" told me that I was "so pretty and naive!" I hooked up with a quiet New Yorker who politely listened to my sociological sputtering. Every drink seemed to be a bigger and more alcoholic one. Eventually, bored, I left the bar and moved down the street to:
1:30 am - The Brass Rail: Tiny bar! Tiny stage! But WONDERFUL people. Trying to regulate my alcohol intake I asked for a single vodka & diet in a tall glass, and the bartender gave me a Long Island iced tea instead. Jamie Monroe arrived to say hi and to invite me out for coffee the following day, which was the moment when my Minneapolis trip changed from "depressing" and "uncertain" to "fabulous!" But as the liquored-up drink started hitting me, things began to grow a little hazy...
A woman named Xavia came into the bar and tried to teach the bartender to make a "Matrix Martini," which involved a lot of incoherent verbal ejaculations and produced a skunky concoction that I was forced to drink part of. Xavia was impeccably dressed and extremely drunk, and she was depressed. Remember that resolution I made about "giving something back" to people during my trip? After Xavia was kicked out of the bar I decided to listen to her and try to get her home.
I have only disconnected impressions of this part of the night, because it was all so surreal. Xavia and I sat on Hennepin Ave and she told me she was a registered nurse, her daughter was a psychopath, and her husband was a deadbeat. In trying to give me her phone number she poured nail polish all over my purse. I told her I'd get her into a taxi and take her home, and she promised to "feed me."
The cab driver's English was poor, so when Xavia gave him an address and he said "are you SURE?" I thought maybe he just didn't understand. I said I'd pay to get her home, he shrugged, and off we drove. Xavia was loud and demonstrative, saying she couldn't approve of my lifestyle because of her religion and repeatedly shouting "YOU DON' KNOW!" I found all this fascinating and she was beginning to calm down a bit...until I noticed that we were on a freeway someplace in the middle of a black wilderness, and the cab fare was up to $30.
Then it hit me...Xavia was too drunk to really know ANYTHING. She'd said she lived in Minneapolis, but she'd given some far-off address to God knows where...an after party? Her parent's house? Another state? So I told the cab driver to turn around, and Xavia started yelling that we had to keep going, and out of everybody I felt the most sorry for the poor driver, especially when she started screaming "I GOTTA PEE! OH GOD! I GOTTA PEE RIGHT NOW!"
We pulled onto an off-ramp, she rolled out of the car and pee'd on the front tire, then she lurched back in saying "Where's the TOWEL?" which I'm sure the driver wasn't happy about. We fought all the way back to Minneapolis, and Xavia's friendship turned gradually to hatred; in her mind I was abandoning her, even though I was returning her only a few blocks from where we'd started from in the first place. I paid the driver $60 -- the price of trying to help this woman out -- and she glared at me like a dog who wanted to bite something it hates. Last I saw she'd managed to get into another cab...the first driver, obviously, didn't want her around anymore.
I was just busting to bitch about this situation and Cindi -- the poor desk clerk at the hotel -- got to listen to me. Fortunately she was wonderful and exposed to me the world of UPTOWN Minneapolis, where the stores are funky and the coffee shops are friendly.
Suddenly I was comfortable in Minneapolis. I'd lost my Summit friends but I'd instantly met some new and wonderful people, and I'd also survived a harrowing experience in a cab with a drunk and crazy woman. Inebriated and happy, my trip was REALLY beginning!
Eating my complimentary Raisin Bran on Wednesday morning I realized the basic flaw in my trip plan: I'd decided to stay on in Minneapolis so I'd have more time to hang around with good people...but all the people I'd met at the STC Summit would be flying out on Wednesday night! Then I'd enter stage two of the trip (exploration and nightclubs) where I'd meet MORE wonderful people...then *I* would be flying away on Saturday! So instead of somehow finding more time to hang around with new friends I would be meeting twice as many people and leaving them just as quickly.
"That's obvious!" you shout. For some reason I'd assumed that other Summit people would be staying in Minneapolis like I was...but none of them seemed to be, and I had yet to meet a Summit person from Minneapolis who was under forty and bar-hopper fun.
8:30 - "Distributed Writing: A Psychology of Social Computer Practices." This was one of those periods when I had to scrounge to find an interesting presentation, but fortunately Johannes Strobel gave the perfect early morning talk: relevant, friendly, and fun. I didn't take many notes because -- once again -- the session wasn't even remotely related to my line of work, but Strobel's point seemed to fall in line with the general Summit theme of forums/wikis/social networking sites being the "new literacy" in which many of the old rules no longer apply.
Sadly this session also had the highest level of "noise comments" from the audience, who constantly asked tangential questions in order to -- basically -- talk about themselves, their blogs, and their general web behaviour. Since Strobel seemed happy to answer any question regardless of its relevance, I compiled a list of question introduction warning signs...when somebody starts a question with one of these sentence fragments, you know it's time to take a bathroom break and grab a bottle of overpriced water in the lobby:
- "Kind of similarly related..."
- "I just wanted to say..."
- "Can I just add..."
- "Kind of a comment on..."
- "I was gonna say..."
- "When I used to..."
Alright, yes, the three presenters talked about their experiences moving content from one management system to another: from an HTML website to a more sophisticated web 2.0 style, from Framemaker to some sort of XML style, etc. Since our docs department is pretty happy with our tools (and we can't even upgrade our existing software, let alone move to an entirely new content management system) I didn't find this session very interesting.
1:30 - "If You're So Smart, Why Does Your Writing Suck?" Bonus points for an enticing title, Karen A. Schriver actually pulled the session together with some relevant (and entertaining) content. Once again we were reminded not to focus ONLY on design and "good English," but Schriver took a more optimistic and proactive approach than many of the other speakers who'd touched on this theme. She told us to avoid "knowledge telling" -- fact/data dumps that use "inside language" and which overestimate the audience's familiarity with a topic -- and be more sensitive to the audience. Good tips, and something we shouldn't need to be told (but we still DO need to be told).
3:30 - Closing Session. After some tastefully short presentations we were totally overwhelmed by Ze Frank, who was exceptionally funny. Much like Jean-luc Doumont he gave some lighthearted interpretations of "low context" signs ("lock your giant baby in a suitcase") before moving into an increasingly serious examination of social network sites.
I wasn't ENTIRELY sure of his final point, but he seemed to be a bit of an apologist for trolls, saying that (like the rest of us) they just wanted to be part of the communication, and that those people behave like trolls for various reasons...reasons that didn't seem to include MY theory, which is that trolls desperately want attention but -- for whatever reason -- just do it in an antisocial way (which Frank likened to doodling genitals at a social gathering). The same way that immature kids pull pigtails because they don't know how to express themselves, or because they're jerks.
He said that, yes, social-interaction technology is evolving at an enormous rate, but humans still have the same old social needs: intimacy, jealousy, egotism, etc. I'm not sure if he ever made a distinct and final point because I wasn't taking notes, and I'm definitely paraphrasing from what I remember of his talk.
Aha, dinner. It was time to budget, and since all of the restaurants in downtown Minneapolis were INCREDIBLY expensive (and since I didn't have any food appliances in my hotel room other than the coffee maker and the ice bucket) I resigned myself to the only food & booze convenience store in the area. I always find that the cashiers and fast-food employees in America are offensively rude, but I think it might be because I'm actually NICE to them; I say "please" and "thank you" and "have a nice day," and since I don't see anybody ELSE doing this, maybe it comes across as obnoxious or condescending to them. Or maybe they're jerks. Or they think I'm a jerk.
10:00 pm - The Gay '90s: Time for fun and adventure! I found myself in the large and complicated "Gay '90s" nightclub, which was apparently dead for even an average Wednesday night. A sad and lonely go-go dancer -- apparently wearing a diaper -- gyrated in a cage for an empty bar. The drag show upstairs was slightly better attended, and I found myself able to WATCH an excellent show without actually needing to PARTICIPATE.
After "Maurice" told me that I was "so pretty and naive!" I hooked up with a quiet New Yorker who politely listened to my sociological sputtering. Every drink seemed to be a bigger and more alcoholic one. Eventually, bored, I left the bar and moved down the street to:
1:30 am - The Brass Rail: Tiny bar! Tiny stage! But WONDERFUL people. Trying to regulate my alcohol intake I asked for a single vodka & diet in a tall glass, and the bartender gave me a Long Island iced tea instead. Jamie Monroe arrived to say hi and to invite me out for coffee the following day, which was the moment when my Minneapolis trip changed from "depressing" and "uncertain" to "fabulous!" But as the liquored-up drink started hitting me, things began to grow a little hazy...
A woman named Xavia came into the bar and tried to teach the bartender to make a "Matrix Martini," which involved a lot of incoherent verbal ejaculations and produced a skunky concoction that I was forced to drink part of. Xavia was impeccably dressed and extremely drunk, and she was depressed. Remember that resolution I made about "giving something back" to people during my trip? After Xavia was kicked out of the bar I decided to listen to her and try to get her home.
I have only disconnected impressions of this part of the night, because it was all so surreal. Xavia and I sat on Hennepin Ave and she told me she was a registered nurse, her daughter was a psychopath, and her husband was a deadbeat. In trying to give me her phone number she poured nail polish all over my purse. I told her I'd get her into a taxi and take her home, and she promised to "feed me."
The cab driver's English was poor, so when Xavia gave him an address and he said "are you SURE?" I thought maybe he just didn't understand. I said I'd pay to get her home, he shrugged, and off we drove. Xavia was loud and demonstrative, saying she couldn't approve of my lifestyle because of her religion and repeatedly shouting "YOU DON' KNOW!" I found all this fascinating and she was beginning to calm down a bit...until I noticed that we were on a freeway someplace in the middle of a black wilderness, and the cab fare was up to $30.
Then it hit me...Xavia was too drunk to really know ANYTHING. She'd said she lived in Minneapolis, but she'd given some far-off address to God knows where...an after party? Her parent's house? Another state? So I told the cab driver to turn around, and Xavia started yelling that we had to keep going, and out of everybody I felt the most sorry for the poor driver, especially when she started screaming "I GOTTA PEE! OH GOD! I GOTTA PEE RIGHT NOW!"
We pulled onto an off-ramp, she rolled out of the car and pee'd on the front tire, then she lurched back in saying "Where's the TOWEL?" which I'm sure the driver wasn't happy about. We fought all the way back to Minneapolis, and Xavia's friendship turned gradually to hatred; in her mind I was abandoning her, even though I was returning her only a few blocks from where we'd started from in the first place. I paid the driver $60 -- the price of trying to help this woman out -- and she glared at me like a dog who wanted to bite something it hates. Last I saw she'd managed to get into another cab...the first driver, obviously, didn't want her around anymore.
I was just busting to bitch about this situation and Cindi -- the poor desk clerk at the hotel -- got to listen to me. Fortunately she was wonderful and exposed to me the world of UPTOWN Minneapolis, where the stores are funky and the coffee shops are friendly.
Suddenly I was comfortable in Minneapolis. I'd lost my Summit friends but I'd instantly met some new and wonderful people, and I'd also survived a harrowing experience in a cab with a drunk and crazy woman. Inebriated and happy, my trip was REALLY beginning!
Big City Muffy in Minneapolis (May 15)
This is part three! For parts one and two see May 13th and May 14th.
8:30 am - "If I'd Known Then What I Know Now--Lessons Learned and Best Practices." Many of us started Tuesday morning watching this panel discussion. Besides pointers about resumes, career advancement, and mentoring, the recurring focus was on a theme that was pervasive throughout the entire summit: since many people now get "help" through forums and wikis as opposed to formal documentation, the "good English" and formatting of a help document is becoming less and less important. The user with broken English can give you just as good (maybe even more cutting edge) help, and they can do it immediately without any frills or nifty pictures or anything.
This upset the two editors in the audience. Their job was basically to make sure that their documents looked good and were written correctly, so what sort of future did they have in a forum/wiki world? The panelists were pessimistic, the editors miffed.
I think the pundits are so anxious to spot a trend that they're jumping the gun on this one. Many people read manuals -- I'm one of them -- and there are some environments where manuals are still considered essential. The manuals that *I* write are for products bought by large media networks, which are disseminated to operators throughout the company. These networks DO NOT allow their operators to just play with the software until they figure it out; they need their operators to be up to speed BEFORE they go on air. And as of a few months ago these companies were CLAMORING for the latest and most up-to-date manuals.
Whether this is a disconnect between management and users, or a difference between consumer products and business products, is difficult to say. But I'm not willing to throw page design and "good English" out the window yet.
10:30 am - "The Use of Cultural Models in Web Design and What Eye Tracking Reveals about Web Usability." Many of us found titles like this to be ironic at a technical communication summit, not to mention the ill-designed session manual (which session period does this page header refer to?) and the dreadful PDF version (which started on page ten and caused constipation in our printers). Regardless, my psych/globalization side wanted to see this session even if it didn't relate to my job in any way whatsoever.
Kathleen Gygi gave a lacklustre report about websites in Uzbekistan. Apparently these websites are usually blue, or something. It was difficult to follow her conclusions, let alone understand how she'd arrived at them (a scale of website blue-eyness, maybe?)
Then Lynne M. Cooke gave a much better presentation about an eye tracking experiment, intended to find out how users look for specific pieces of information on web pages. Her main conclusion was that users look for links that both match their search criteria AND speak to their personal conceptions of themselves as audience members, and her secondary conclusion was that people don't often look at pictures on web pages, especially if the pictures look remotely like advertisements. This was disputed by another researcher in the audience, which brought a spark to the discussion until they'd figured out the differences in their research methods (people DO look at pictures if the picture is of a product they're specifically searching for).
I went back to The Local for lunch with Sue and her brother, where we chatted about the problems with pollen in Minneapolis (which had laid a few people low already), then returned for:
2:00 pm - "Polishing Your Pictures." Like I said, I came to the summit partly to find out how to improve the images and charts in my documents, and Patrick Hofmann's presentation made lots of sense: standardize the attributes of your images, decide on the "primary focus" for every image, decide what needs to be emphasized or excluded, and test your image by VERBALIZING what you see in it. He described some methods for displaying screenshots, which was a real revelation for me: you don't NEED to show the entire dialog in the manual! You CAN crop it, if you present the cropped area properly! That's stuff I can USE.
But throughout the presentation I couldn't help thinking that I recognized him, and that he was lacking the midwestern twang or southern drawl I'd been growing so accustomed to. When he mentioned growing up in a small town in Ontario I became even more suspicious. I spoke to him briefly after his talk and he instantly recognized me from Club Abstract -- a K/W native! -- and though we tried to make plans to get together we just never managed to connect, for whatever reason.
4:00 pm - Rather than go to Tuesday's final session I decided to spend the afternoon exploring downtown Minneapolis, taking some pictures along the way. I'd heard about the "warehouse district" that supposedly had some hipster stores in it, and since we'd found ourselves among refurbished warehouses during our previous night's walk, I retraced our steps and tried to explore the northern part of the city.
Starting at the Mississippi -- which is much more impressive than my picture conveys -- I went Northwest in search of warehouses. I zig-zagged back and forth a bit but was unable to find any shops, and eventually I found myself in a district full of REAL warehouses and factories, across a set of railway tracks and totally lost. I could SEE downtown Minneapolis but I couldn't get back to it: I was blocked off by fences and closed pedestrian walkways, and when I say "fences" I mean eight-foot structures with angled barbed wire at the top.
In this picture I'm trapped within a literal maze of fences, behind a series of factories whose gates are locked and unattended. Worried about rain, closing gates, and the strange man who I kept running into, I'd decide to go on another few blocks, only to find myself in yet another fenced-in dead-end.
Finally I retraced my steps almost all the way back to the river. Back at my hotel I realized that I had no dinner plans; everybody makes these plans at the final sessions, which I'd just skipped. Tim told me that another amorphous group of writers would be meeting at Brits Pub. I found myself an honourary member of the "Lone Writers" special interest group, eating samosas with the shyest Calgarian you can possibly imagine. There was speculation about a trip to the local gay bars but I decided to turn in early. The night was over, it was too late to start getting into drag, I was bushed, and what the heck would I do during the next four days?
8:30 am - "If I'd Known Then What I Know Now--Lessons Learned and Best Practices." Many of us started Tuesday morning watching this panel discussion. Besides pointers about resumes, career advancement, and mentoring, the recurring focus was on a theme that was pervasive throughout the entire summit: since many people now get "help" through forums and wikis as opposed to formal documentation, the "good English" and formatting of a help document is becoming less and less important. The user with broken English can give you just as good (maybe even more cutting edge) help, and they can do it immediately without any frills or nifty pictures or anything.
This upset the two editors in the audience. Their job was basically to make sure that their documents looked good and were written correctly, so what sort of future did they have in a forum/wiki world? The panelists were pessimistic, the editors miffed.
I think the pundits are so anxious to spot a trend that they're jumping the gun on this one. Many people read manuals -- I'm one of them -- and there are some environments where manuals are still considered essential. The manuals that *I* write are for products bought by large media networks, which are disseminated to operators throughout the company. These networks DO NOT allow their operators to just play with the software until they figure it out; they need their operators to be up to speed BEFORE they go on air. And as of a few months ago these companies were CLAMORING for the latest and most up-to-date manuals.
Whether this is a disconnect between management and users, or a difference between consumer products and business products, is difficult to say. But I'm not willing to throw page design and "good English" out the window yet.
10:30 am - "The Use of Cultural Models in Web Design and What Eye Tracking Reveals about Web Usability." Many of us found titles like this to be ironic at a technical communication summit, not to mention the ill-designed session manual (which session period does this page header refer to?) and the dreadful PDF version (which started on page ten and caused constipation in our printers). Regardless, my psych/globalization side wanted to see this session even if it didn't relate to my job in any way whatsoever.
Kathleen Gygi gave a lacklustre report about websites in Uzbekistan. Apparently these websites are usually blue, or something. It was difficult to follow her conclusions, let alone understand how she'd arrived at them (a scale of website blue-eyness, maybe?)
Then Lynne M. Cooke gave a much better presentation about an eye tracking experiment, intended to find out how users look for specific pieces of information on web pages. Her main conclusion was that users look for links that both match their search criteria AND speak to their personal conceptions of themselves as audience members, and her secondary conclusion was that people don't often look at pictures on web pages, especially if the pictures look remotely like advertisements. This was disputed by another researcher in the audience, which brought a spark to the discussion until they'd figured out the differences in their research methods (people DO look at pictures if the picture is of a product they're specifically searching for).
I went back to The Local for lunch with Sue and her brother, where we chatted about the problems with pollen in Minneapolis (which had laid a few people low already), then returned for:
2:00 pm - "Polishing Your Pictures." Like I said, I came to the summit partly to find out how to improve the images and charts in my documents, and Patrick Hofmann's presentation made lots of sense: standardize the attributes of your images, decide on the "primary focus" for every image, decide what needs to be emphasized or excluded, and test your image by VERBALIZING what you see in it. He described some methods for displaying screenshots, which was a real revelation for me: you don't NEED to show the entire dialog in the manual! You CAN crop it, if you present the cropped area properly! That's stuff I can USE.
But throughout the presentation I couldn't help thinking that I recognized him, and that he was lacking the midwestern twang or southern drawl I'd been growing so accustomed to. When he mentioned growing up in a small town in Ontario I became even more suspicious. I spoke to him briefly after his talk and he instantly recognized me from Club Abstract -- a K/W native! -- and though we tried to make plans to get together we just never managed to connect, for whatever reason.
4:00 pm - Rather than go to Tuesday's final session I decided to spend the afternoon exploring downtown Minneapolis, taking some pictures along the way. I'd heard about the "warehouse district" that supposedly had some hipster stores in it, and since we'd found ourselves among refurbished warehouses during our previous night's walk, I retraced our steps and tried to explore the northern part of the city.Starting at the Mississippi -- which is much more impressive than my picture conveys -- I went Northwest in search of warehouses. I zig-zagged back and forth a bit but was unable to find any shops, and eventually I found myself in a district full of REAL warehouses and factories, across a set of railway tracks and totally lost. I could SEE downtown Minneapolis but I couldn't get back to it: I was blocked off by fences and closed pedestrian walkways, and when I say "fences" I mean eight-foot structures with angled barbed wire at the top.
In this picture I'm trapped within a literal maze of fences, behind a series of factories whose gates are locked and unattended. Worried about rain, closing gates, and the strange man who I kept running into, I'd decide to go on another few blocks, only to find myself in yet another fenced-in dead-end.Finally I retraced my steps almost all the way back to the river. Back at my hotel I realized that I had no dinner plans; everybody makes these plans at the final sessions, which I'd just skipped. Tim told me that another amorphous group of writers would be meeting at Brits Pub. I found myself an honourary member of the "Lone Writers" special interest group, eating samosas with the shyest Calgarian you can possibly imagine. There was speculation about a trip to the local gay bars but I decided to turn in early. The night was over, it was too late to start getting into drag, I was bushed, and what the heck would I do during the next four days?
A Break: "Remind Me" by Royksopp
To help break the monotony of seven posts about Minneapolis, here's a video that presenter (and UofW graduate) Patrick Hofmann played before his "Polishing Your Pictures" session.
Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful illustration of all sorts of effective design concepts...but it's also a great song and a great video!
Yeah, yeah, it's a wonderful illustration of all sorts of effective design concepts...but it's also a great song and a great video!
Big City Muffy in Minneapolis (May 14)
This is part two! Click here for part one.They provide a complimentary breakfast in two small rooms at the Holiday Inn, and they discourage you from lingering by playing CNN really loud. They also employ this technique in the lobby to keep you from using the computer for too long (and to also keep you updated about stranded whales, shipwrecked booty, and Jerry Falwell's long-overdue death).
In this picture you can see the conference center in the background. Everybody gathered there at 8:30 am for the Keynote General Session, where STC people honoured other STC people and where Al Gore (absent) was given an award for "An Inconvenient Truth," which the three bull-necked guys in front of me scoffed at. The crowd of educated, critical thinking technical writers seemed surprisingly lukewarm about Gore's film and his techniques of communication. A subset of the crowd became even more edgy when Simon Singh, the keynote speaker, praised the film and trashed "The Great Global Warming Swindle."
Ah yes, Mr. Singh. A few years ago I read his "The Code Book," and on May 13th I picked up his latest book ("The Big Bang") to help save me from an avalanche of depressing novels. As honourary STC fellow, Singh spoke at the conference and gave us a deconstruction and analysis of his "Fermat's Last Theorem" documentary. He even confessed to his own switcheroo: he'd subtly modified a quote from a mathematician in order to translate it into layman's terms. He discussed the lines that documentary filmmakers need to cross in order to make an understandable film. In short, as long as you keep the intent of the quote without distorting it, you're probably okay. If you feel guilty or the person you interviewed gets angry, that's bad.
11:00 am - Since the "How to Design Anything" session was cancelled I found myself attending "Tips and Tricks for Adobe RoboHelp Users." I constantly use RoboHelp (version five) to create online and dialog help for projects, and it's absolutely hellish...but it does what it's supposed to do (and if we'd upgrade our copies we'd be able to do a bit more, like create conditional text and use text variables).
Unfortunately many of the tips were for users of version six, and the one tip I was looking forward to -- how to prevent a help topic from appearing during a "search" -- was a terrible and embarassing kludge that I wouldn't wish on anybody. So I didn't get anything out of this session other than a trial copy of version six and a sneak preview of the Totally Exciting and Amazing Version Seven.
Here's my own tip for Adobe: don't send a developer to demo a product unless he does professional demos on the side. The guy who showed us Version Seven was incoherent and spent most of the time showing us how to move and dock windows on the screen, which is not much of a "feature" and something that people know how to do anyway. Based on the sneak-preview I can confidently report that there are many, many ways to move and dock windows in the new version of RoboHelp. In fact there are almost LIMITLESS ways to meticulously move a window, if you include moving the window in all four directions, as well as all the combinations of those directions. You get a lot of window-docking-mileage out of Robohelp Seven, and there may be some other features too that we never got to hear about.
During lunch I ran into Tim from Philiadelphia, who recognized me in the Panera Bread line. He followed the networking instructions we learned during orientation ("It's just talking!") and we hit it off. Tim invited me to a somewhat nebulous and impromptu eat/drink meeting scheduled for that night, which I happily agreed to. Tim became my most constant and welcome companion in Minneapolis and I hope I get to attend next year's STC Summit, which will be held in his hometown.
During lunch I also ran into Sue, who I used to work with in the pre-buyout days of my company. It's ALWAYS a pleasure running into Sue! Plus we got to gossip about work in a way that we couldn't do when she was actually an employee...
1:30 pm - "Effective Page Layout for the Nonartist." I can't design a chart or a diagram to save my life so I hoped to get some tips at the summit. This session (by the very entertaining Jean-luc Doumont) was more for people who design 20-page reports than for those who write 200-page manuals, but I found two of his ideas useful: more blank space equals greater readability, and it's bad to give yourself too many options. He recommended choosing strict constraints for your projects -- one font, one style, one colour, all spacing constrained to horizontal and vertical integers -- with exceptions allowed ONLY when doing so adds value. Also be consistent.
In short, the page templates which we use at my workplace are ALREADY excellent and conform to most of his design specifications, for which I can thank my manager (who was also nice enough to approve my Minneapolis trip, incidentally).
Then Doumont went completely off the deep end, describing how he manually composes his emails so that EVERY line ends EXACTLY at an abnormally short right margin, INCLUDING the final line. Seriously, he chooses his words and punctuation and sentence structure to make sure his monospaced text ends PERFECTLY. God forbid should he need to add something in the middle of a paragraph at a later time, or should the email receiver view his emails in a small window, but he claims that nobody has ever complained. Chances are that's because nobody cares as much about email formatting as he does.
Incidentally the different elements of technical communication -- formatting, "good English," and "good content" -- kept being debated during the conference. I'll get to that later, but let's say that Doumont still believes that formatting is EXTREMELY important (but, like I said, his demographic is more businesspeople and ad agencies that folks who read computer manuals).
3:30 pm - "Road Signs: Finding Your Way in the Visual World." I couldn't resist ANOTHER presentation by Jean-luc Doumont. This one was 75% fun and 25% content, but his points were interesting (if not always useful).
By juxtaposing North American signs with European signs he illustrated the differences between "high context" and "low context" cultures, and showed the pros and cons of "wordy" versus visual signs. In short, wordy (high context) signs spell everything out for you but can overload you with information, can be difficult for people who don't speak the language, and still assume that the reader understands some degree of context ("xing ped" for example).
More visual signs are useful if their concepts are unambiguous, but it was easy to understand that there are problems with standardizing colours/shapes/symbols, not to mention gender issues (how are men and women figures represented?). Is it better to use old, established icons (telephones, televisions) as opposed to updated ones that better represent what the objects look like today? And what kind of a dog is a dog, anyway?
Tim and I met up with the rest of his posse, one of whom was an ex-Minniapolitan who took us to a bar with a moose head in it. We discussed the Boston Molasses Disaster and finally found that statue of Mary Tyler Moore that everyone told me to see. I found an instant conversational chemistry with C., who was born and raised in the deep south (New Orleans, Austin) and who told me what SHE thought about politics, Katrina, books, and The South.C. really wanted to visit the 112 Eatery so we began a drunken walk which first took us to the Mississippi river, then past "Sexworld," and finally to the eatery itself, which was uncomfortably swanky but apparently served excellent fois gras meatballs.
Big City Muffy in Minneapolis (May 13)
I started a journal on May 13th at 7:30 am. I stopped making entries in the journal at 9:15. Why? I don't know. Maybe we can figure it out as I present this retrospective examination of my days in Minneapolis, from May 13th to May 20th.
But first an explanation. I signed up to attend the three-day annual Technical Communication Summit, and since my airfare would already be covered I decided to extend my stay in Minneapolis, therefore getting a short "holiday" that theoretically would cost me very little. I find it sad that whenever I visit someplace, I always have to leave just after I've met a group of wonderful people. This way I'd meet wonderful people...and have the time to get to KNOW them a bit!
The problem is that I'm a sort of nervous, panic-stricken individual who does not adapt well to change. I also had to leave my cat behind for an entire week, and I'm sad to say that I've grown almost TOO attached to her. I've become the type of person that I make fun of: reclusive, ritualistic, and in love with an animal. So this trip was bound to be a bit trumatic.
I think airports are awful because their procedures change every time I visit them. At 6:30 am on Sunday morning -- still depressed about the cat -- I dealt with new automated machines that both check your luggage AND give you a boarding pass, which required more than the usual amount of passport/E-ticket/luggage juggling. I was also embedded in a group of women who were going to Minneapolis for a missionary conference. One of them shouted "Praise Jesus!" when she discovered her misplaced passport.
My first instinct was to make fun of these people -- if Jesus needs to intervene every time you're a scatterbrain, shouldn't you shape up to make his job a little bit easier? -- I started to form a resolution that was to cause much joy and suffering throughout the week. I watched these women sitting together and waiting for the plane, and I couldn't help acknowledging that they were the most friendly, social, and happy people at the Gate (if not in the entire airport). They swapped stories about child-rearing and discussed their needlepoint projects ("It's the Twelve Days of Christmas, but the problem is that they get more detailed with each day!") while the rest of us hunkered down with our books and iPods and our soon-to-be abandoned journals.
So I made this resolution: in Minneapolis, I would be as friendly, giving, and tolerant as possible. I would emphasize COMMONALITIES instead of differences. Instead of relying totally on the kindness of strangers -- which I so often do when I travel -- I'd try to give something back to society by being generous and open-minded. In short I'd be a gullible schlump, but we'll get to that on May 16th.
In the airplane I was thrilled to see Lake Huron. Or was it Lake Ontario? Or Erie? It was hard to say but I DO know we flew over some awfully big lakes. We also looked down on segregated patches of farmland and gradually lost sight of smaller things like cars and houses, though the pill-shaped racetracks were always visible, as usual. This leads me to wonder (as I always do when I fly) why we have so many racetracks? They're everywhere, but it never seems that way on the ground. We also got to see the tops of storm clouds which were black and evil and rising up toward us in characteristic anvil shapes.
On the ground, however, Minneapolis was sunny and hot. It was 10 am on a Sunday morning, but with the time change (and the fact that I'd been awake since 4:30) it felt like the afternoon, and my first view of the city was devastating: no people. No cars. Just deserted buildings and shops. Not even the Scientology and Christian Science buildings were open. Since my hotel room wasn't ready yet I wandered around and around and around: skyways, parking garages, enormous corporate headquarters, no place to eat, no place to buy a coffee. And only me on the streets.
I was already sad about "the cat thing" but now I had a new worry: was Minneapolis a pathetic ghost town? Was I doomed to spend an entire week in this place without new friends or new experiences or any form of social interaction beyond the Automatic Baggage and Boarding Pass machines at the airport?
In hindsight it's obvious that ANY city is deserted on Sunday morning, but this was a blow to my already fragile state of mind. To lift my spirits I retreated to my hotel room and tried to read the two books which I'd brought along based on their size (small and light) as opposed to any real foresight. The first, "Nights in the Underground" by Marie-Clair Blais, was about a depressed and homesick woman who tried desperately to find warmth and comfort in a strange city. The other was "Diversey" by MacKinlay Kantor, about a depressed and homesick man who tried desperately to find warmth and comfort in a strange city.
Feeling justifiably homesick and depressed, I made a beeline to Barnes and Noble to buy books that wouldn't make my life any more difficult than it already was, books interesting and happy but not Opra-stupid. I settled on "The Big Bang" by the wonderful Simon Singh and a book of "Challenging Logic Puzzles" by Barry R. Clarke ("Hearts is one place before Bleereye who was two places after King"). As a sidenote, I found MacKinlay Kantor's literal transcription of regional dialects to be even more depressing than the book's subject matter ("Hooey, juss out, juss out. Hooey, aggstry papey, hooey. Allll ay-bowt thu big----Hooey, hooey!")
I bought a third book on the recommendation of a woman at the bookstore -- "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris -- but I didn't get around to opening it. I was uncertain about that woman's judgement, since her first recommendation -- after hearing my "interesting and happy" requirement -- was a book about the destruction of the World Trade Center ("I know it doesn't sound funny, but it really is!")
5:00 pm: Finally time to register for the Conference and join the "First Timer's" meeting, where they deliberately make you sit at large tables with other people who are all looking inward, supposedly so you can meet each other. I sat beside Art from Illinois, who told me all about the Canadian parliamentary system and kept confusing me by saying "English" when he meant "British." He shouted out details about poverty, racism, politics, and economics. He told me how best to interact with Native Americans, all without any prompting whatsoever. When more people joined our table and another one of them happened to be Canadian, Art yelled out "Thank God the Canadians are here, now we'll have some SMART people at the conference!" I decided that Art was not somebody I wanted to hang around with.
Instead I went to The Local with B., a woman who rarely made eye contact, instead gazing to the right of my face in a lofty way. We had an illuminating and equal chat about books and food and writing, but when somebody has a lofty expression which she won't even aim directly at me I figure they either don't like me or they don't like themselves. So B. and I didn't eat food together again.
Afterwards I shopped at Target for the first time, which made me think of Josie and the Pussycats. I was amazed when the cashier built a sturdy "carrying handle" for my Diet Pepsi out of Target stickers, but when I laughed and pointed she glared at me like it was something I should be used to, which means this innovation is probably a common one at Target stores. It certainly made it easier to lug the Pepsi back to my hotel.
One more word about Target: I always thought it was similar to Walmart, but if you say that to people who are familiar with Target they will vehemently deny any comparison. People in Minneapolis are proud that their Downtown is almost totally devoid of chain stores, and rightfully so. Unless you count Target and Starbucks and Macy's and Walgreen's, of course.
But first an explanation. I signed up to attend the three-day annual Technical Communication Summit, and since my airfare would already be covered I decided to extend my stay in Minneapolis, therefore getting a short "holiday" that theoretically would cost me very little. I find it sad that whenever I visit someplace, I always have to leave just after I've met a group of wonderful people. This way I'd meet wonderful people...and have the time to get to KNOW them a bit!
The problem is that I'm a sort of nervous, panic-stricken individual who does not adapt well to change. I also had to leave my cat behind for an entire week, and I'm sad to say that I've grown almost TOO attached to her. I've become the type of person that I make fun of: reclusive, ritualistic, and in love with an animal. So this trip was bound to be a bit trumatic.
I think airports are awful because their procedures change every time I visit them. At 6:30 am on Sunday morning -- still depressed about the cat -- I dealt with new automated machines that both check your luggage AND give you a boarding pass, which required more than the usual amount of passport/E-ticket/luggage juggling. I was also embedded in a group of women who were going to Minneapolis for a missionary conference. One of them shouted "Praise Jesus!" when she discovered her misplaced passport.
My first instinct was to make fun of these people -- if Jesus needs to intervene every time you're a scatterbrain, shouldn't you shape up to make his job a little bit easier? -- I started to form a resolution that was to cause much joy and suffering throughout the week. I watched these women sitting together and waiting for the plane, and I couldn't help acknowledging that they were the most friendly, social, and happy people at the Gate (if not in the entire airport). They swapped stories about child-rearing and discussed their needlepoint projects ("It's the Twelve Days of Christmas, but the problem is that they get more detailed with each day!") while the rest of us hunkered down with our books and iPods and our soon-to-be abandoned journals.
So I made this resolution: in Minneapolis, I would be as friendly, giving, and tolerant as possible. I would emphasize COMMONALITIES instead of differences. Instead of relying totally on the kindness of strangers -- which I so often do when I travel -- I'd try to give something back to society by being generous and open-minded. In short I'd be a gullible schlump, but we'll get to that on May 16th.
In the airplane I was thrilled to see Lake Huron. Or was it Lake Ontario? Or Erie? It was hard to say but I DO know we flew over some awfully big lakes. We also looked down on segregated patches of farmland and gradually lost sight of smaller things like cars and houses, though the pill-shaped racetracks were always visible, as usual. This leads me to wonder (as I always do when I fly) why we have so many racetracks? They're everywhere, but it never seems that way on the ground. We also got to see the tops of storm clouds which were black and evil and rising up toward us in characteristic anvil shapes.
On the ground, however, Minneapolis was sunny and hot. It was 10 am on a Sunday morning, but with the time change (and the fact that I'd been awake since 4:30) it felt like the afternoon, and my first view of the city was devastating: no people. No cars. Just deserted buildings and shops. Not even the Scientology and Christian Science buildings were open. Since my hotel room wasn't ready yet I wandered around and around and around: skyways, parking garages, enormous corporate headquarters, no place to eat, no place to buy a coffee. And only me on the streets.
I was already sad about "the cat thing" but now I had a new worry: was Minneapolis a pathetic ghost town? Was I doomed to spend an entire week in this place without new friends or new experiences or any form of social interaction beyond the Automatic Baggage and Boarding Pass machines at the airport?
In hindsight it's obvious that ANY city is deserted on Sunday morning, but this was a blow to my already fragile state of mind. To lift my spirits I retreated to my hotel room and tried to read the two books which I'd brought along based on their size (small and light) as opposed to any real foresight. The first, "Nights in the Underground" by Marie-Clair Blais, was about a depressed and homesick woman who tried desperately to find warmth and comfort in a strange city. The other was "Diversey" by MacKinlay Kantor, about a depressed and homesick man who tried desperately to find warmth and comfort in a strange city.
Feeling justifiably homesick and depressed, I made a beeline to Barnes and Noble to buy books that wouldn't make my life any more difficult than it already was, books interesting and happy but not Opra-stupid. I settled on "The Big Bang" by the wonderful Simon Singh and a book of "Challenging Logic Puzzles" by Barry R. Clarke ("Hearts is one place before Bleereye who was two places after King"). As a sidenote, I found MacKinlay Kantor's literal transcription of regional dialects to be even more depressing than the book's subject matter ("Hooey, juss out, juss out. Hooey, aggstry papey, hooey. Allll ay-bowt thu big----Hooey, hooey!")
I bought a third book on the recommendation of a woman at the bookstore -- "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris -- but I didn't get around to opening it. I was uncertain about that woman's judgement, since her first recommendation -- after hearing my "interesting and happy" requirement -- was a book about the destruction of the World Trade Center ("I know it doesn't sound funny, but it really is!")
5:00 pm: Finally time to register for the Conference and join the "First Timer's" meeting, where they deliberately make you sit at large tables with other people who are all looking inward, supposedly so you can meet each other. I sat beside Art from Illinois, who told me all about the Canadian parliamentary system and kept confusing me by saying "English" when he meant "British." He shouted out details about poverty, racism, politics, and economics. He told me how best to interact with Native Americans, all without any prompting whatsoever. When more people joined our table and another one of them happened to be Canadian, Art yelled out "Thank God the Canadians are here, now we'll have some SMART people at the conference!" I decided that Art was not somebody I wanted to hang around with.
Instead I went to The Local with B., a woman who rarely made eye contact, instead gazing to the right of my face in a lofty way. We had an illuminating and equal chat about books and food and writing, but when somebody has a lofty expression which she won't even aim directly at me I figure they either don't like me or they don't like themselves. So B. and I didn't eat food together again.
Afterwards I shopped at Target for the first time, which made me think of Josie and the Pussycats. I was amazed when the cashier built a sturdy "carrying handle" for my Diet Pepsi out of Target stickers, but when I laughed and pointed she glared at me like it was something I should be used to, which means this innovation is probably a common one at Target stores. It certainly made it easier to lug the Pepsi back to my hotel.One more word about Target: I always thought it was similar to Walmart, but if you say that to people who are familiar with Target they will vehemently deny any comparison. People in Minneapolis are proud that their Downtown is almost totally devoid of chain stores, and rightfully so. Unless you count Target and Starbucks and Macy's and Walgreen's, of course.
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