The Spacebar Has a New Home

Things have been a little quite around here, on the site at least, as I have been busy trying to finish off my freelance technical writing site and its accompanying blog. And they’re both finally finished!

So update your feed readers and anything else if you’d like to continue following my adventures in tech writing:

spacebarpress.com/blog is the new home.

Hope to see you over there!

Editing Fallout

Yesterday I talked about an experience I’ve been having at work with regards to my editing of some translation we had done for us. The translation company apparently either fired or at least transferred: the translators, the project manager, and we switched the “language manager”. Today I met (in person) with the new project manager and she explained what they normally do when they have the “regular” amount of time to do translations (I did mention that we’re doing these translations on an extremely short deadline, right?) At any rate, it turns out that because of the short time frame, their entire process for editing their own translations themselves broke down, and that’s why they ended up having to change everybody around. (To wit: the other set of translations that we had to done in the same amount of time by the same company [different translators & language], they were fine. So obviously they could do it right in a short period of time.)

What really surprised me was that they normally only ask their customers to test out the functional part of the translations (we’re putting the translations on our website), not the actual context. Well duh, I thought it was strange that I was asked to do that type of review, but was happy to do it. They normally fix all the things I was complaining about while they’re doing that contextual review themselves. The project manager got messed up with the short time lines, and couldn’t handle juggling both their contextual review and our functional review in that short period of time. She freaked out, went to her boss who went to the head of the company, who called the head of my company and so on. That’s why things got so out of hand. But again, the second set of translations they did for us in the same time turned out fine, so obviously there was a problem with the quality of translators they had, as well as the quality of the project managers.

So I guess the lesson to be learned here is that you should always follow a process regardless of the time line. If it’s a good process, it will hold up. Otherwise it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

How Brutal Should You Be When Editing?

Have you ever edited a document and then wondered if you were too brutal with that red pen? This past week has found me reviewing some translations at work, and I was wielding my red pen swiftly and ruthlessly as I red through it. I was rephrasing sentences, slashing verb endings and generally muttering to myself as I wondered how professional these translators were. After about three days of this (and about 55 bugs reported in our bug tracking software), apparently the proverbial excrement hit the fan.

I heard from the project coordinator that the translation project manager had been “reassigned”, and that the translation company was “freaking out” over the number of bugs I reported. (I must confess that the number of bugs could have been higher, but after reporting the same bug for the third time, I simply entered “check everything for this problem” to save everyone time.) Later on that afternoon, the CEO of my company turned to me in a related meeting and said, “Don’t worry, we’re gonna get the PMs in town on this one next week and get everything sorted out.”

I was a bit surprised, however felt somewhat mollified that my uber-boss, the founder and owner of the private company I worked for, had my back. The coordinator told me that phone calls went back and forth at the highest level, but that my UB told them that his QA person (me) knew what she was doing, and that if she said there were that many errors, then they better get their act together and fix it all. The new project manager at my company then asked me privately how “qualified” I was to do that type of translation review, and so I gave him the list:

1. I grew up speaking the language at home.
2. I did an honours degree (that’s a 4 year university degree) in that language’s literature, writing essays in the 20+ page range in that language.
3. I practice the language now by reading novels & watching the evening news in that language on tv several times a week.
4. I consider myself fluent in every sense of the word, having also considered moving to this country to work.

I don’t mind that he asked, as any good PM should, however I was a tad miffed he asked me that late in the process, and also a tad miffed that I’m getting tasked at doing foreign language QA when it’s not my main job focus. My company has a habit of doing that, of taking advantage of its employee’s skills and using them for their own gain. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to help out, however I think sometimes they take too much advantage, and people get worked up over things that aren’t really their “core competency” (as my immediate supervisor likes to say.)
Now, I know that when editing any work, especially a translation, your own personal preferences can come into play, and I know sometimes that was happening to me, however having been a technical writer for over 7 years now, I know when I’m doing that and am able to dial it back. I went back over my bug reports and culled a list of about 10 things that they kept doing consistently and sent the coordinator that list. I am going to look at the corrected translations when they send them back over and keep my fingers crossed that they fixed all those 10 things. Let’s see how that goes…

Mining Your Dreams for Story Ideas

Last night I had the most curious dream that I thought would make a good story or novel. Normally I don’t usually remember enough of my dreams long enough to write them down, and I don’t like keeping pen & paper near my bed. (my brain knows it’s there, and doesn’t let me get to sleep easily. Silly, I know, but that’s just me!) So I did my usual trick: repeated the salient points to myself as I showered, as I got dressed, as I had breakfast, until I finally sat down at a computer an hour later. And I think it’s a pretty good one too.

It also got me thinking about the story I had written for Nano last November, and how I wanted to carry on the story, so I also started to take a look at that one as well. I’ve spent the last few lunch hours going over the 20,000 words I’d written then, and am pleased with the direction the story is taking. I’ll probably start moving the story along as well, so I’ll keep you posted on that progress.

What Was Microsoft Thinking?

Have any of you switched over to Microsoft Word 2007 yet? My workplace is just making the switchover now, and I must say I am highly annoyed with that. Actually, I’m not annoyed with my company, but with Microsoft (MS). They have decided to cater to the lowest common denominator of Word users, and make the interface more “user friendly” (and I use that term extremely, extremely loosely here.) As a power user of Word, I’ve gotten used to being able to do my word processing tasks a certain way, or at least know where to hunt for things if I didn’t know where it was. But now, with this so-called “improvement”, MS has made the UI so incomprehensible that the learning curve for power users has gone up to an insane amount. I mean, I’m used to a period of adjustment when upgrading, but this is just insane. Why is it that MS decides to cater to the beginner to intermediate user and seemingly are now ignoring the power user? Is it just me that thinks this new change affects power users this way? Perhaps I’m just being oversensitive, however right now I’d like to know who their UI and usability team was, and ask them the classic “WTF?” because I find this switch really unnerving.

They’ve moved previously grouped items like page breaks and section breaks to different “views” (their version of a tab there at the top of the window). They’ve changed the name of the Normal view to Online (or was it something else? I forget, it’s just such an unobvious change that I can’t seem to remember the new one.) They’ve buried the Style Editor into this teeny, tiny, insignificant little box/arrow thingy that it took me and another TW with over 15 years experience 15 minutes to find it!

Is anyone else having difficulty with Word 2007? Is it really more user friendly? Have they actually made anything easier to do for the power user? I have only been using it for less than a week, so I can’t speak to that, however I’ve seen it over the months since it’s release and was shuddering at the thought of having to use it, however here I am. Let me hear your thoughts dear readers, because I find this to be an extremely frustrating experience.

Wiki Reorg Update: Testing Out Other Options

A few weeks ago, one of my collegues told me that one of his buddies at another software company had had great success using SVN and another wiki software called Confluence. So I checked it out and found out that it’s made by Atlassian, which also makes JIRA (the bug tracking software we already use). That, in and of itself wasn’t the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is that  Sarah of the ffeathers blog works there as one of the technical writers! I thought that was a very interesting six degrees of separation moment. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blog post…

In the beginning…

My boss was very intrigued by the idea of Confluence, as was I. It seemed to be a rather robust software offering, that would let us do all sorts of things we lament about not being able to do now, plus it would also help us share information amongst us, which is something my colleagues have been complaining about as well. We attended a webinar, which I must admit, I didn’t find terribly enlightening. The reason that happened was because I was expecting the session to be more technical than it ended up being. Mostly a error on my part, because as an introduction to the software, I should have expected it to be a little more business-oriented and marketing-related. But that’s okay, because we got to see the software in action and figure out if we wanted to proceed with an evaluation.

Proof of concept…

I downloaded the software last week install a local instance, and attempted to go through the setup procedure. Most of the managers in my company like to see the proof of concept before deciding to give their “buy in” on projects, so I thought this was the best thing to do next. The installation was as easy as the documentation said it was, although due to a slight technical glitch, I was having some problems. But I contacted Atlassian’s Live Chat technical support, and was on my way about 20 minutes later.

Customize this!

The next part of my proof of concept was to actually configure and customize the wiki and start loading in some content. Well, I stopped at the customization part of the show, since it was very cumbersome. When Confluence is set up, it appears to be easy to use (which will be good for my colleagues), however I don’t find the configuration/customization part to be as intuitive as it could be. I found my time was starting to get away from me as I was trying to sort through things, so I ended up just setting my local instance aside, and refocusing on my other documentation responsibilities. I did end up writing a quick and dirty white paper on Confluence and my thoughts on the whole product, so that my boss knows what I think of it.

The end result?

In the end, I think the product is a good one, and something we could definitely use, however I don’t think we’ll have the time to customize it ourselves, so I’m going to recommend we use one of Atlassian’s professional services partners, that will set everything up for us so we don’t have to do it ourselves. My boss is constantly saying that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and do things that aren’t our “core competency.” Whether that’s buying geoIP software to install with our website, or purchase a wiki software & have it configured out-of-house, I think my boss will go for that. And considering how much the Confluence software costs, even if the Pro Serv costs are the same, it’s still a steal, in comparison to other software purchases I’ve seen employers make in the past.

Feeling Uninspired? Me too

These last few days I have been feeling especially uninspired to blog, on any of my blogs. In fact, I started three posts tonight on two different blogs, and ended up round filing them. I am also feeling quite tired tonight, case in point: I fell asleep whilst watching my favourite hockey team play for first place. (That would be the Montreal Canadiens, in case you were wondering.) I never, and I mean never fall asleep watching hockey! So I guess that means I’m one tired writer. Work has been pretty good these days, as I’ve put the wiki reorg slightly on hold while I research a new wiki software solution. And I’ve also been moving along nicely on getting my other documentation projects going at work, which is good. My boss said to me in my post-year review a few weeks back that he’s about “results”, and that while he knows that I’ve made good headway on a lot of things, and he knows I am working hard, he’d like to see more “concrete results” from me this year. So I’m trying to make a good effort at producing those. But working in a non-deadline driven environment makes it extremely hard. I’m not used to this type of pressure, as I’m used to getting end user documentation ready for a release on certain days of the year. So this open-ended “just document the system the way it is” mandate I’ve got is a little more fluid and ephemeral than I’m used to.

But I am definitely enjoying it. It’s fun trying to get the information out of the heads of the developers in my group, and trying to get them thinking about documentation. The easiest part of that equation is getting them to comment their code properly so we can automatically generate “good” documentation from it. (Plus it has the added benefit of helping out their fellow colleagues too.) The more difficult part, and of course this is my task, is trying to get them to write up a quick doc about their work, that explains anything that needs to be configured, set up, or in general just explained. I keep telling them that they don’t need to make things fancy, that’s my job.

“Just write it down. That’s all I ask. A bullet point list, a run-on sentence that goes on for half a page, it doesn’t matter,” I tell them. “Just write it down.”

I’ve got the backing of both the Dev team lead and the Director of Development, so that’s good. In fact, they know how important it is because the information I need to write down is all in their two heads, but until someone invents those USB ports for our memories like in the Johnny Mnemonic novel by William Gibson, there’s no easy way to get the information out of their heads. haha.  So this is what we’ve come up with. We/I’ve made a good start too, as a couple of the developers have already submitted some documents for “TW massaging”. I’m excited at the direction we’re taking with this idea, so let’s see how it goes.

Hmm, I guess I was a little more inspired than I thought in writing this post. See what happens when you ‘just do it’?

Snow day!

Today I’m taking a pseudo-snow day and will be working from home. Toronto’s getting hit with a nasty snow storm, and while I know we’re Canadian and should be able to deal with snow, most Torontonians can’t. Seriously though, when we’re supposed to get 15cms in the course of 3 or 4 hours, plus blowing & drifting due to the wind, and even some freezing rain later on this afternoon, even us Canadians think about altering out plans. I made sure to bring home some work yesterday though, just in case, and while I don’t have VPN access to work, we have webmail access, so I can communicate with people if I need to, and I don’t actually need to be connected to work to do some work. Sure, VPN access would be nice as I could do more work, however even without I’m okay.

Wiki Reorg Update: Site Specs

Some of you have been asking for some of the technical details of the wiki we’re using at work, so here’s a quick post about it.

1. We’re using MediaWiki, version 1.11 (I think that’s the right version number), with no extensions installed. Just the plain vanilla version, although I think I may install the RenameUser extension just to allow the admins the permissions to rename wiki users, as that seems like a logical thing to do.
2. I’m using MediaWiki’s import/export functionality to move the pages over. It’s a bit laborious, as it doesn’t actually tell you that a group of pages you just exported is to big to import, so I end up having to do it a couple of times for certain groups, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not bad.
3. I’m exploring the option of having one of our system administrators help me with moving the pages into the various namespaces on the wiki. Importing pages into namespaces involves three steps: a) Importing the page to the wiki, b)Moving it to the namespace, and c)Deleting the redirect page (that’s just because I hate redirect pages.) So because I’m moving hundreds of pages over, I’m seeing if it’s possible to insert the namespace prefix directly through the database, which would save me a ton of time. I would only have to create a list of page names, which is much easier to do.
4. I was initially going to be using MediaWiki’s Category functionality to further sub-divide pages on the wiki, however as I write this right now, I’m just thinking I may not have to do that step since I’ll already be dumping the pages into the various namespaces, which, since they correspond to the various departments in our division, may be the only grouping I need to do. Hmm, definitely food for thought, as it would save me having to go into each page and adding the tag to them. What do you think about this?
5. I’ve divided the current wiki into 4 different ones: one for the Division, and one each for the products we’re working on. Makes life easier to sort through.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for a progress report as I export/import more pages. Cheers!

Researching the Freelancing Life

Since I was awake very early today, I decided to do some research on freelance writing. One of my goals for the year is to start freelancing on the side, with the idea of moving toward doing it full time. So this morning I surfed around a number of sites like The Golden Pencil, and Writing the Cyberhighway. I got some great tips and inspiration from these and the other sites I went around to, and will definitely keep going back to get more inspiration. I think I may start coming up with some interim goals, like making a list of places to submit, in order to make sure I meet my goal of freelancing something this year. Let’s see, let’s see if I can get myself in gear for a March 1st deadline, how does that sound? I will make a concerted effort to find 5 places to submit some writing, and possibly even make the submissions, although that won’t be part of the goal just yet.