I’ve been using TypePad since the second beta, and just today became aware of a rich site of TypePad resources. It’s called, oddly enough, Unofficial TypePad Resources and Ken Mohnkern, of CalebWalker pointed it out. It’s been operating since August 19.
Who knew?
A small committee of Board member of the Society for Technical Communication has begun a (TypePad!) weblog about improving the organization — soliciting comments. Each day (so far) has focused on a particular theme.
Monday addressed structure, and has now gathered 93 comments.
Tuesday brought up the ever-popular topic of dues and has 33 comments.
Wednesday was on another finance topic: what are other ways to gain income while serving members, and so far has only 5 comments.
Glad they asked. it’s about time there was widespread discussion about these things — not just chapter and conference bitch sessions. Some excellent ideas are coming forth, as well as some whining.
I’ve added it to my aggregator (BlogLines) and will be paying attention. So are some other STC member and former member bloggers.
Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, has another posting about outsourcing. Called “Dissing American Tech Workers,” it begins:
Amid the worst technology recession in memory, influential members of the tech industry are seeking to import more foreign workers to the United States. What gives, apart from political obtuseness?
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday (paid registration) that chip maker Intel, among others, is pushing Congress to lift the cap on H-1B visas, which allow citizens of other nations to live and work in the United States.
It has elicited quite a few comments since its posting at noon today, and there will probably be more by the time you go check it.
Go check it.
Xeni Jardin, in BoingBoing (you’ll have to scroll down a ways), points out a new publication: Japanese manga about bloggers:
The blog that link points to is mostly in Japanese, but some of the comments are in English.
Update: Joi Ito has also blogged about this, with more detail. According to him it also contains “an interview with ‘the developers of Movable Type’.'”
How odd. I was reviewing my referrers, and noticed a hit from Comcast.net/qry/. I clicked to see what that was, and why it hit on me. The search was for
idolatry humor
I came up in first place. Mystified, I tried Google. That showed me in second place. AllTheWeb and AltaVista did not show me on the first page. Neither did Vivisimo, nor Teoma, nor IncyWincy, nor ProFusion.
I checked to find out just why Google had ranked me so high. Nothing on that page seemed obvious. I checked the cache link, and found what was going on. This was on the archive page for the humor catgory, and each post on the page had the word “humor”. Among the comments, there were a number that referred to the posting entitled:
False gods: Idolatry and the “first superpower”
Both Comcast’s searcher and Google appear to have focused on the page because of the number of mentions of both those words on the same page. Go figure.
Ellis Pratt, Sales and Marketing Director of Cherryleaf left a comment in the posting below about Andy Grove’s remarks on outsourcing. He referred us to the recent article by William Birn, on the Cherryleaf website entitled “The death of the Technical Author?”
I browsed around the Cherryleaf site and noticed another article that interests me as a tech writer: If no-one reads the manual, then why bother?
Do you suppose that the names of all articles on the Cherryleaf site are titled as questions?
Ever get a song stuck in your head? “It’s a Small World Aaaaafter Alllllll”?
Here, in MSNBC, they report that “James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati” has studied “How unwelcome songs get stuck in our heads — and how to unstick them.”
Now, they say that he calls them earworms, as though this was a new label, but this term has been around for years, and is just a translation from the German: “Ohrwurm.”
That citation is to The WordSpy: a “web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words and phrases, old words that are being used in new ways, and existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance.”
Thanks are due to Katharine O’Moore-Klopf, of the COPYEDITING-L mailing list, for bringing the “earworm” article to my attention.
A few weeks ago, I started using BlogLines, a free (so far) RSS aggregator. Well, now Jeremy Zawodny has created a simple mechanism for aggregator users to subscribe to Yahoo News in such a way as to watch for news stories that contain certain words. His examples include “George Bush,” “Justice Department,” and “Open Source.” I have subscribed to watch for news stories that mention the company I’m working for. I’m sure I’ll think of others that I want to keep tabs on.
My news source of choice is http://news.google.com/, but they seem not to have an RSS feed…as yet.
If you don’t recognize the term “aggregator” follow the link below.
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Once again, Halley’s spot on.
Take an inventory of all the things you have going on in your life. Decide which really matter and which really don’t. It can be a little shocking. Like cleaning out closets, when you are done, you wonder, why was I keeping all that crap around here anyway?
. . .every day we put off real and authentic relationships with living human beings and choose other silly busy work, to get through our days instead.
There are many psychological tests that have been used to help people, and sometimes their employers or potential employers, understand their propensities. As a technical communicator who has no pre(or in)tentions of management, I was not surprised to come up as an ILUG on this test:
Thanks to Andrea Frick for a link that led me (indirectly) to this test.