Yes.
I’m a little bit late with the March/April 2007 issue of Stimulus. It’s been one of those months when everything becomes a comedy of errors. The issue has been sent to the printers and will be mailed out on Tuesday morning. The next issue should be going out on time during the second week of May.
Via Techwr-l:
The latest episode in the Yokneam Forum of Technical Writers‘ Life as a Technical Writer series, God and the Technical Writer.
And in the beginning there was nothing. And then one day a huge bang was heard that echoed round the universe and when the smoke had cleared, all that could be seen was a giant Product Manager and a petite Technical Writer
The Yokneam Forum of Technical Writers has a number of other entertaining columns, including Mike Altman’s Why am I a Tech Writer. Check ‘em out.
I have a book addiction, enabled by easy online access to Amazon and Chapters. I tend to go through cycles—sometimes buying fiction, sometimes buying non-fiction, but almost always buying a number of books on the same topic at once. It’s quite an expensive habit.
Over the past year or so, I’ve gone through a few cycles of buying technical writing and/or grammar books. Some I’ve bought because I really want to read them. Others I’ve bought because I want to review them. In an attempt to keep up with them all, I’ve added a plugin to this blog called What Am I Reading? I’ve added my last batch of purchases to it and will gradually add the other technical writing and grammar books on my “to do” list to it. You’ll see it near the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.
In order to make use of this plugin, I’ve had to change the skin used on the blog from Ocacia to the default WordPress skin (with a version of the same downtown Ottawa image that is on the main site in the header)—Ocacia didn’t load the individual book pages properly and I didn’t feel like mucking around with the styles and php files.
Thank the Lone Writer SIG for passing this on:
Introducing the Book
(Well, actually it’s really called Helpdesk i middelalderen but the linked post here is titled Introducing the Book.)
A Norwegian skit about medieval tech support, featuring a help desk technician showing a confused user how to use a book. English and Danish subtitles. Very funny. Not really technical writing related but technical — and funny enough to be worth the link.
The NRK Helpdesk i middelalderen page links to the original video (sans subtitles), viewable in an embedded player or in Windows Media Player. The subtitled clip linked to above is missing a few seconds at the end where the user is apparently having trouble with a smaller book as well. Note: the pages don’t load in IE.
Via Tom’s I’d Rather Be Writing blog:
DMN Communications, a Toronto-based technical writing consultancy company, has been offering technical-writing-related podcasts since December 2006. The podcasts can be listened to or downloaded from their Podbean site. Most are under ten minutes long. On February 27, though, they presented a 30-minute podcast called Becoming a technical tech writer. I’ve downloaded it but haven’t listened to it yet but by all accounts it’s an interesting listen. Worth putting on your podcast schedule, along with Tech Writer Voices.
How very cool. The British Library has a Shockwave-based tool called Turning the Pages that allows you to virtually flip through a number of books in their possession, including Sketches by Leonardo, Mercator’s 1570s Atlas of Europe, and the Diamond Sutra, which was published in China in 868. The National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Library also offer Turning the Pages access to a few of the books in their holdings.
Found via work/space:
Der Meister sol auch kennen schreiben und lesen: Writings about Technology ca. 1400-ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implications is the text of a talk given at the University of Texas at Austin in 1976 by Bert S. Hall, associate professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. The article seeks to “…explore the boundary between the sub-literate, and therefore sub-historical, phase of technological development and the beginnings of a continuous, cohesive written literature concerning technological matters.”
It’s a really interesting article that traces the early history of technical writing and artwork in the 15th and 16th centuries. The German title of the article comes from a line in Feuerwerkbuch, a 1420-ish manual for gunners that “consists principally of recipes for pyrotechnic compounds”, which indicated that the master gunner must be able to write and read.