Comic strips are always a great source of inspiration. At the risk of the source for this file enforcing it’s “Redistribution in whole or part prohibited” policy, I’m posting it for your enjoyment. I hope that a link back to the ArcaMax website is enough to hold off the lawyers. I mean, those who know [...]

Now that I have your attention: A fellow Tech Writer (Tina—I mean Holly Harkness) turned me onto a Wired magazine article about how blogging has lost the spontaneous, personal feel, now that there are so many of them out there. According to the writer, Paul Boutin, one would have more success being heard by contributing to the Facebook-, Twitter-, Flickr-, or YouTube-ospheres, rather than the blogosphere.

From the beginning, blogs have always been about conversation and sharing. Yes, several have advertisements on them. Yes, several have hired pro writers (for instance, Duo Consulting hired me). And yes, many do read more like online magazines than personal observations from the field. But nobody’s forcing you to read them. You can select what you want to read.

Forgive me Father, for I have not yet sinned—but just might. After looking at specs for laptop computers yet again, I am facing another bout of gear lust. We all know that lust is one of the seven deadly sins. The virtual ink is not even dry on my last blog post, yet already the urge is so strong I need to confess my desires right away.

To think: all I was looking for was a Windows-compatible laptop/notebook computer with a full-size 6-pin Firewire (IEEE1394) port and graphics card with dedicated RAM. The machines below don’t have Firewire. They don’t have dedicated graphics hardware. But you must admit, they are cool. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these videos should be just over the top.

Leaving a job is hard, regardless of the one making the decision. Whether the choice was mine or the company’s didn’t stop me from the feelings of loss, and the ensuing depression that paralyzed me for a couple of days before I could move forward. Nobody prepared me to be released from a job when I was doing well, and this was the case.

It would have been easy to feel bitter at the apparent injustice of the situation, except that my faith in God, who provides every good and perfect gift, has already prepared me for my next assignment. And my next assignment for me. I know that I need to rely on His strength in my times of weakness. And there have been many times. Several times. Per day.

I have only one more week on my current contract at PMC-Sierra. My final responsibility is to finish off this über cool web view of one of our documentation products, which will be integrated as an output stream from the newly-installed XDocs XML content management system. The best part about technical communication is that I get paid to write all day, and when I need a break, I can fix the CSS for an embedded help system or hack some JavaScript. My Technical Communication department manager gave me permission to showcase the web output with obfuscated text in my portfolio, so be on the lookout for samples in the near future.

For the last month I’ve been going nuts trying to hack the ExtJS javascript application framework, recommended by the Technical Adviser from PMC-Sierra’s Web Services department. I have no problem applying different plugins to my project. However, when I try to add custom behaviours to the objects, I get that little red Firebug that shows me the hand and says “not so fast, cowboy!”