GuysBlog

Who wants a button? Kalsey Consulting Group has a web page that you can use to create a button image. Create one and save it locally, and you can use it as a graphic for any purpose. All buttons it produces are 80 pixels wide by 15 high.

It creates a button divided into a left and a right boxes. You choose the color of the outer and inner borders and the position of a vertical bar separating the left box from the right one. For each box, you choose background color, text color, text, and text offset from its left edge. If you want a one-box button, make the bar position 0 pixels from the left and specify only the values for the right box.

For a sample, take a look below the headshot on the front page of this weblog.

The button maker is but one of several tools they offer on their tools page.

From Quotes of the Day:

“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.”
                                 John Benfield

The ITtoolbox charactrizes itself as the

IT Knowledge & Support Network

It has a weblogs section called ITtoolbox Blogs.

One of the features is IT Outsourcing: Special Coverage from the Front Line

The debate surrounding IT outsourcing is heating up. To help provide an in-depth, real-world view of the issues and impacts of this phenomenon, ITtoolbox Blogs is now featuring special coverage on offshoring, highlighting firsthand experiences and front line perspectives of ITtoolbox Blog authors from across the globe.

I’ll be reading this blog….

The ITtoolbox charactrizes itself as the

IT Knowledge & Support Network

It has a weblogs section called ITtoolbox Blogs.

One of the features is
IT Outsourcing: Special Coverage from the Front Line

The debate surrounding IT outsourcing is heating up. To help provide an in-depth, real-world view of the issues and impacts of this phenomenon, ITtoolbox Blogs is now featuring special coverage on offshoring, highlighting firsthand experiences and front line perspectives of ITtoolbox Blog authors from across the globe.

The April-May issue of Sound Off, the newsletter of the Puget Sound chapter of STC, brings two articles that I found interesting:

Certification for technical communicators: The time is now — by Peggy Jacobson
and
Think weird and prosper — by Rahel Bailie.

Peggy opines that it is time (yea, past time) for STC to support certification for technical communicators. She cites other similar organizations that have done so. Why not STC?

Sure, there are lots of different kinds of TCs, but some skills are universal. Also, there can be a baseline certification and the speciality certifications, or some folks might get just the baseline, then a certification in the area of their primary audience, such as Oracle or Microsoft programming.

Rahel quotes from Tom Peters:

“The only way to effect true transformation in the workplace is to enlist the outliers in your organization to your cause. Find the weirdos and the freaks, offer support for the projects they’re secretly pursuing, then get them to help you with your own revolutionary change ideas.”

She recounts how she has used “weirdness” to differentiate herself as a technical communicator and even to defuse road rage.

I wonder how one might apply these two concepts together….

Thanks to Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, for the tip about Peggy’s article which led me to discover Rahel’s.

A student from India posted on SlashDot about the state of US education and attitude.

I come here and notice that being smart or good is being made fun of - this, despite the fact that I’m in one of the US’s top engineering schools. The ones with the social life are the ones who show off or the ones who throw ball. Even here, being really smart or nerdy is looked down. People do not respect the need for some of us to be introverted and reclusive, and people are branded as obnoxious or stereotyped as nerds or geeks, most often in a derogatory manner.

Am I bitter? Absolutely.

I come from an environment where both my parents went to grad school, half the people in my family are PhDs and my uncle is a quantum physicist at CERN. When I was in middle and high school, I wanted to be a physicist or a mathematician. Social life was not an issue, it was always a given.

This is not just about his social life — it is an indictment of our society’s attitude towards technologists in general.

A signifcant number of comments follow the main item cited in Slashdot. Check it out.