Part of this meme:
LISP
The most valuable part of my education as a technical writer was my ( Read more... )

From this job posting for an API Technical Writer (sic):

"Our ideal candidate [...] Comfortable authoring in HTML and XML using plain-text editors (no WYSIWYG)"

That's how I work all the time. I didn't know anybody else cared. :-)

(Because (1) after 30+ years the emacs muscle-memory is strong; (2) it means I actually know the spec (at least the ( Read more... )

This week we finally got some routine legal documents in order. Snippet from today's review meeting ( Read more... )

Dani pointed me to Fantasy In Miniature. here are three that caught my fancy. I have just doubled the subscriptions to fantasyinmin. (I wonder who the other one is.)

From siderea: The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft.

Toleration versus diversity (David Friedman) was an interesting read for me.

Chat-based ask-the-rabbi service, for when ( Read more... )

Someone on a tech-writing mailing list today asked the following: "As a hiring manager, what are you looking for in a resume? Do you think hiring managers with a technical writing background look for different things than one that is just getting to employee their first technical writer?" I want to record my response here:
I am a software ( Read more... )

( documentation, cities, religion, music )

I'm reading torah tonight (unusual) and tomorrow morning (not unusual). Part of the latter package is giving a short d'var torah (torah commentary), so for the last few days I kicked some ideas around in my brain and last night I wrote a draft. (I'm still on my written-text kick rather than speaking from notes ( Read more... )

You know you're among geeks when questions like "but really, what is the true nature of a book?" make perfect sense. (A group of mostly tech writers and moi, discussing the partitioning of a doc set into DocBook-sanctioned units like sets, books, parts, and chapters.)
Quote of the day: ...And adjectives, like gang members, seldom ( Read more... )

Some folks at work have been having the discussion/argument about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun. This usually boils down to a religious argument and hey, I know better, but today I sent the following message:
[We should be trying to communicate clearly, and sometimes language rules prevent that.]
I agree. This is why, when ( Read more... )

A coworker and I had one of those mutual "you believe what?!" moments, and it was surprisingly educational and non-heated. Nifty.
We were talking about documentation that's meant to be viewed online ( Read more... )