commentary

Tech Support - No Thinking Required

There's an old joke:

The Software people will tell you it's a Hardware problem. The Hardware people will tell you it's a Software problem. If all else fails, both will blame the Network.

Today's modern "Tech Support" seems to reduce this to one easily-remembered primary rule: It's not our problem. The job description for many Tech Support groups would appear to be very simple:

1. Read to the user from the manual. It's not necessary to pick the "correct" part as long as one or two words match the complaint.
2. If that fails, disavow all knowledge of the problem.
3. Success in getting the user to reinstall the system (and remove all "third-party software") is a plus.

Blech

I recently ran into a very odd symptom on my Kyocera 7135 "Smartphone". The 7135 is a clamshell flip phone combined with a Palm PDA - very nice. One of its features is an external LCD strip that shows the Caller ID of the incoming call. The LCD also shows battery level, signal strength (when applicable) and current time.

A few days ago, the LCD clock disappeared.

"Blog People"

You may have heard about Michael Gorman's recent diatribe against weblogs and the people who write them (posted in Library Journal, Feb. 15, 2005). It's distinctly uncomplimentary.

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.

Ouch.

Mr. Gorman bases his judgment and his comments on far too small a sample. He also considers only a very narrow section of possible weblogs and webloggers: specifically the ones he feels "attacked" his viewpoint in an earlier op-ed piece he wrote for the L.A. Times.

Judging all weblogs (and worse, all "blog people") by a handful of personally annoying postings is akin to judging all periodicals by a handful of less than savory articles or magazines. One should not attempt to classify Scientific American or Readers Digest (or even Library Journal) if one has only seen a few small-organization newsletters or a copy of Hustler.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gorman is not simply an annoyed writer posting a rebuttal in an online forum. He's also president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services at Cal State, Fresno. Such a display of peeved ignorance as Mr. Gorman presents, issuing as it does from such a lofty and public position, reflects poorly on librarians everywhere. It is my hope that some of the more enlightened librarians will see fit to take Mr. Gorman aside and educate him privately.

Cosmic Laugh Track

"May your life amuse the gods, Captain," I said cheerfully. He raised one bushy black eyebrow. "That is not a greeting I have encountered before." I pointed out that it was a worthy one and asked if he would prefer the hazards of boring them. "Indeed, when you express the matter like that, then I see the wisdom in it."       — Dave Duncan in "The Reaver Road" The gods too are fond of a joke.       — Aristotle

Rich and I believe in what we call The Cosmic Laugh Track. Some people talk about Murphy's Laws but The Cosmic Laugh Track is much more.

As a good example, there was the time I pulled into the driveway (having picked Rich's brother up after a conference in the South Bay) and he said "the ride seemed rough", then got out of the car to examine the tires and we discovered one sidewall had metal showing. That wasn't an instance of The Cosmic Laugh Track. Rather, The Cosmic Laugh Track would have come into play had I then driven anywhere but to the tire shop the next morning because, of course, the tire would have blown had I driven on it now that I knew. And we would have heard The Cosmic Laugh Track.

giggle

Then there was the three-act comedy a co-worker got himself into recently when the tutorial he had planned (the last of a series) was pre-empted and postponed for several weeks in a row. Finally, his to-do list was cleared of all urgent matters and the Class Was On for the following Wednesday! That is, until we arrived at the workplace that morning to discover there was a power outage (since 07:45). By the time power was restored at 2pm, the class had been (you guessed it) postponed again.

chortle

To Wiki or Not To Wiki (take 2)

As I mentioned a few months ago, the Company I work for has been giving serious consideration to moving the Development section of the Intranet onto TWiki. However, when I spoke to one of the engineering managers last week, I learned that he is considerably less ecstatic now about using the Wiki for all of our Project tracking and documentation. I find myself in agreement with that; I've never been much in support of migrating alll of our web use to the Wiki.

However, I personally still see the Wiki as a potentiallty valuable tool. I believe we should continue to keep Wiki available (and improve upon it) as part of the Corporate Intranet.

Instead of saying

Let's convert all of our project development workflow over to using Wiki.

I would like us to ask instead

What can Wiki do for the Company? What are the strengths and weaknesses of Wiki? What should we migrate and what should we leave as is?

Wiki should complement what we have, link into pages that already exist, and give us the ability to move forward using all of our tools as they work best.

Automotive Privacy?

How "personal" is the information about the car I drive?

If I stay in a motel, I am usually asked for the make, model, and plate number of my car when I register. Likewise, when I have worked for companies that issue parking stickers (for parking on what is, after all, private property), I am asked for the same information.

Why, then, is it, that when I work for a company that doesn't issue parking permits, and I suggest a (voluntary) Company database of employee automobile information, do I get the reaction "Oh, my, I don't know if we could ask for that. That's personal information!" This has happened more than once or twice.

Uh huh. My home telephone number is "personal information" yet my company routinely asks for that. They want to be able to reach me "in case of emergency". But somehow, asking for my automobile information is an invasion of privacy? Instead, if someone's lights are on or there's a fender bender in the parking lot, we send out little notes across the company:

Does anyone drive a green BMW sedan, license GRN SDN? Your lights are on... and a tree just fell on your car.

It's not like I'm suggesting a mandatory database. Even if I was (and I can't), what makes this information private? If I want to know what make and model car you drive, I merely have to watch out the window when you drive into the parking lot in the morning.

I've begun to wonder if the "privacy" question is simply a euphemism for "we don't want to bother".

A Passion for Writing

Insanabile cacoëthes scribendi   *

I recently interviewed a possible technical writer candidate. When I asked her "Why do you write?" she said "I enjoy it... and the money's good". It was an honest answer. It wouldn't have been my choice.

I write because it's part of who I am. I have always had a passion for writing things down.

Writing is just something I do, all of the time. I make notes, I make lists. I write snippets of poetry. I write essays. I write letters. I conduct most of my communication via email (email conversations are self-documenting :-). I keep "lab notebooks" of my projects for my job.

I kept a journal through College, then stopped except for trip journals. I discovered the web in 1994 and started my own pages that have spread to several sites. I write articles for technical publications.

This past December I celebrated the one-year anniversary of restarting my daily journal. I've been keeping (multiple :-) weblogs now for over two years.

Writing isn't involuntary, like breathing, but it's automatic for me, like taking the stairs even when there is an elevator. I am a writer as I am a techie or a programmer or a person with red hair. It's just what I am.

It makes sense that I find a job to "support my writing habits". :-)

Five years ago I did a stint as a technical writer for Apple. I enjoyed the writing, but there were some problems with the job (documenting vaporware is frustrating) and some serious stresses in my life at the time. So after a year I went back to programming. But it wasn't the same somehow. I'm not really a "developer". My preference in programming is for small tools and data filters. There's not much call for that in jobs. And even as a programmer, I write constantly. I write comments and READMEs and proposals and memos and email. I document my code. I document my processes. I take close-to-verbatim notes in meetings.

So, when I was looking for work again this last time around, I looked harder for technical writing jobs than programming jobs. I managed to find one and I'm currently doing "internal technical documentation" — writing how-tos and overviews, reviewing docs of various types, assisting with the user guide, helping with design specs.

It feels right. It's what I do.

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  * An incurable passion to write (Juvenal, Satires)