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2007 in Review

February 3, 2008 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

above: another gorgeous winterline sunset, Mussoorie, December 2007

The past year was so busy that, in spite of the many articles, photos, and videos I published here, there are still travels and events that I haven’t even mentioned, video and photos you haven’t yet seen. 2008 is shaping up to be even busier so, in case I never get to those, I thought I’d do a quick gallop through 2007 and at least hint at some of the stuff you missed.

The first half of 2007 was mostly awful. But, somewhere around August, things changed drastically for the better, and I began to think of having a T-shirt made saying: “Life doesn’t suck.”

January

6: As a Christmas present from my dad, Ross and I, along with some of the British side of our family, saw Spamalot in London, the very last night that Tim Curry was in the cast. Fantastic! We also had our portraits taken.

14: Enrico and I took a day trip to Sormano and other points on the Lake Como peninsula above Bellagio

19-21: In Rome for my first (but not last) barCamp.

February

Ross and I were busy completing her application to Woodstock School, due March 1st. Much anxiety around this whole process, not least: wondering how I would pay for tuition.

14-19: I visited my dad in the UK again. I don’t remember now if this was because he had been in the hospital again or what.

^ Alpini in Lecco, March 2007

March

7: Attended the Cisco Expo in Milan.

20: Began working for Sun Microsystems, as a part-time contractor. First trip to Broomfield, Colorado, returning on the 28th, just in time for:

30: First Girl Geeks Dinner Italia

31: rItalia Camp

Infant apricots on the young tree in our garden. late March, 2007

April

Worked on my garden, held down two jobs, Ross got accepted to Woodstock (and now I knew that I could pay for it).

hothouse geraniums, Apr 15, 2007

22: Visited Milan Design Week with Ringae Nuek. (No, that’s not her in the picture.)

Milan Design Week 07 –

this was taken in the courtyard of Castello Sforzesco

28: Enrico and I went to the Castello di Vezio, near home on Lake Como.

May

15: Flew to Colorado for Sun again. Visited my classmate Tin Tin in her fly genetics lab. Returned to Italy just in time for:

26: FemCamp

June

Continued preparations for Ross to go to Woodstock, including getting her student visa for India.

17: Had lunch with Pamela, a Woodstock alumna, and her Swiss-Italian husband Tino at their holiday home on Lake Como.

21-25: Visited England while my dad was having knee surgery again.

Towards the end of the month, a doctor saw something she didn’t like on my mammogram, which began a period of torture and extreme anxiety. Around the same time, my mother was having an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit removed. Which, thankfully, turned out to be benign.

at the beach – July 6, 2007

July

5-8: We drove down to Roseto degli Abruzzi for my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday, stopping along the way at an excellent restaurant near Modena.

11: Finally got the word on my biopsy: no cancer. The next evening, to celebrate, we had expensive cocktails with friends before we all went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix together (in English) in Milan.

14: Had a visit from Peter and Peggy Jenks, former Woodstock staff.

21: I (and a bunch of other people) won a dinner at one of Italy’s finest restaurants, Symposium, in Le Marche, sponsored by San-Lorenzo.com. Spent the night in the nearby town of Cartoceto, which Susan and I toured the next day in intense heat.

28: Ross and I flew to London with her 46 kilos of luggage, to spend a few days with my dad and Ruth, and pre-celebrate Ross’ 18th birthday:

August

1: Ross flew out from Heathrow. Her departure did not go smoothly. But she got there safely and was happily launched on her great India adventure.

3: I flew to Colorado to spend my vacation (from TVBLOB) working for Sun, staying with Tin Tin again.

when geeks do urban planning – Broomfield, CO – Aug 2007

11: Ross turned 18 at Woodstock. By this time we were getting regular phone calls from her and knew that she was doing well and very happy. This was worth all the upheavals it had taken to get her there.

12: Tin Tin and I went hiking in the Rocky Mountain National Forest.

17: Flew to New Mexico to visit Woodstock friends Steve and Sharon.

18: Sharon and I visited Santa Fe, including the Crafts Museum.

31: College friend Steph came to visit from Tulsa; we drove down to Taos by way of the Garden of the Gods.

September

2: Back to Broomfield.

5: Flew to San Francisco and saw many old Bay Area friends, and a few Woodstockers, before going down to San Jose, where I filmed many Sun speakers at the Storage Networking Industry Association’s Software Developer Conference (SNIA SDC).

15: Participated in a fun fundraiser in San Francisco.

17: Flew back to the UK and spent a couple of days with Dad and Ruth.

20: Flew back to Milan. By this time, I had parted ways with TVBLOB, and only had one job to do, to my considerable relief.

We had house guests as soon as I arrived: my Woodstock classmate Sara Ahmed, and long-time family friends Leslie and Nathan. While they were all with us, we visited the beautiful old abbey at Piona, towards the northern end of Lake Como.

28: Enrico and I began to enjoy the advantages of the empty nest. On a sudden invitation, we took off and spent a weekend inVenice:

October

6: Wine-tasting in Valtellina.

19-21: Hosted Web Women Weekend at our home in Lecco.

27: Enrico and I took another day trip on the lake, eating at Beccaccino (justly famous for its fish) in Sorico.

November

3: Enrico and I went to Lugano for eTourCamp, on the way taking the ferry across the lake:

Lake Como, Nov 2007

10: My travel arrangements for India all set, we had our traditional fall dinner party a bit early.

14: Left Milan for Delhi. Arrived the same night, slept in a hotel for a few hours.

15: Took the Shatabdi Express to Dehra Dun and a taxi to Mussoorie. Wandered around the school looking for my kid til I finally met up with her on the ramp. She hugged me tight and whispered: “We’re so weird.”

16: Filmed Ross et al in a Bollywood version of “The Taming of the Shrew” – she played Bianca.

19: Pondered my past as a technical writer and my future as… what?

^ Ross and cat, Mussoorie

28: I turned 45.

Wrote, photographed, and filmed lots more stuff about Woodstock, spent intense times with many old and new friends, all the while working remotely for Sun.

December

14: Ross and I, alongside a school party of 200 kids plus chaperones, went down to Delhi at the start of our winter vacation.

16-18: In Delhi: shopping, eating, running around, seeing friends.

^Â I have not tried dragan (dragon?) fruit yet – never heard of it before. Note the strawberries, cherries, and plums – none of these were available in India a few years ago.

19: We flew to Mumbai, where we spent another intense period shopping for a sari, seeing many old friends (mine), and meeting movie stars. And I bought art:

^ a piece by artist Rashmi Dogra – a tin valise, with a Kathakali dancer’s face – this was my Christmas present for me!

29: Ross flew to Goa, I flew to Delhi.

30: More shopping in Delhi.

31: Arrived in Milan, Enrico picked me up at the airport. After a few hours at home to rest and unpack, we drove up to a place in the mountains where friends were staying, to celebrate New Year’s with them. I made it through dinner, but slept through the traditional midnight feast of lentils – and slept through 25 people partying in the room next door, and fireworks going off in the street outsidehttps://www.beginningwithi.com.

And I think that’s about enough for one year!

what I do

Workspaces – “Office” is Where the Laptop Is

December 5, 2007 Deirdre Straughan 6 Comments

I must be the perfect modern employee. In my 20+ years of working life, I have rarely had an office or even a cubicle to call my own, and haven’t particularly wanted or missed one.

In the three-room apartment that was our home in Milan for 13 years, my workspace (when I wasn’t in a shared office) was a corner of our bedroom. The temporary cubes I was assigned on my visits to Silicon Valley were a comparative luxury!

But, even in cramped conditions, working at home had advantages: if my daughter was sick and had to stay home from school, or if public transport was on strike (as happens frequently in Italy) and I couldn’t get to the office, it just didn’t matter. As long as I had a computer and an Internet connection, I could be productive wherever I was.

I began travelling extensively for work around 1994, so I always had a laptop (in addition to or instead of a desktop computer), and was accustomed to working anywhere, anytime.

This became a standing family joke: we would stage pictures of me working in unlikely places: on a P&O ferry from Calais to Dover, at the top of a snowy Alp, on a beach recliner in Martinique.

I did not actually work in any of those places – I do know how to take a vacation. But not being tied to a desk meant that I could work, when I chose, anywhere in the world. I didn’t have to take vacation time to be present at the obligatory family holidays halfway across Italy: I could spend time with the family and still get my work done.

In our new home in Lecco, I have a small home office with a spectacular view – who needs a corporate corner office?

But that’s not enough to keep me in one place. My colleagues at Sun don’t much care where I am physically located (and are scattered all over the world themselves, both in Sun offices and at home), so I can pick up my laptop and go wherever I want to. With my Sun badge, I can waltz into any Sun office in the world and use a desk and high-speed Internet – but I don’t have to.

Right now I’m in India, visiting my daughter at my old school. Thanks to the hospitality of a classmate, I’m in a comfortable home with a more-than-decent Internet connection. I can even use Skype to keep in touch with my colleagues. The only thing lacking is a desk, but, hey, I’ve still got a lap.

And the view ain’t too shabby, either.

How about you? Are you ready to give up a cube or office?

my life in tech, what I do

The Evolution of a Technical Writer – Bringing Documentation Into the Web 2.0 Age

November 20, 2007 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

How has technical writing evolved in the age of the Internet? How have tech writers’ jobs changed, and how should they continue to change, in response to new technologies now available for sharing knowledge with our customers?

Prologue: The Dead Tree Society

My technical writing career began twenty years ago, with the design and writing of software training courses for desktop publishing. These were delivered as printed sheets in a binder used in face-to-face classroom training.

The first manual I wrote was for an optical-character recognition software. Soon after that, I co-authored a very technical book (Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, Random House, 1993), which included a manual for Easy CD 1.0 (later named by PC World one of the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time).

The book was one of the first in the world to include a CD, for which I produced a screen-readable, hypertext-rich version of the text (the CD also contained a demo version of the software). This early experience demonstrated the power and flexibility of electronic texts, but we still had to deliver them on physical media.

Moving It Online

Between 1992 and 1995, I wrote manuals and software-based help for several versions of Easy CD and other CD recording software. Paper manuals were (and are) expensive to produce, print, and distribute. Even “online” help, when it’s deeply hooked into the software (e.g., context-sensitive help for each dialog box) could not be rev’d any more frequently than the software.

As we entered the Web 1.0 age, customers’ expectations of company responsiveness increased, and these old, familiar processes were no longer fast enough. We needed a way to provide customers with updated and expanded information about our software, on demand (in response to FAQs and newly-discovered bugs as they arose), and at low cost.

The worldwide web came to the rescue. When the small software company I worked for was bought by Adaptec, I had pages ready to post on Adaptec’s new website. I soon found myself responsible for the busiest (though not the largest) section of the Adaptec site, which eventually brought in up to 70% of overall traffic – clearly, we were providing information that customers wanted.

Usability

Meanwhile, a separate but converging trend in the industry aimed to improve software usability. After years of slaving over manuals, I realized that, for most users, RTFM is a last-ditch solution. At least where consumer software is concerned, most of us just dive in and start using it, and only look to documentation when we can’t figure out something from the UI (user interface). Users increasingly expected that they should NOT need to open a book or help file, except maybe when using advanced features – a reasonable expectation, I think.

I further observed that, when a software process or feature is difficult (as opposed to complex) to document, this usually means that something’s wrong in the software design. I began working closely with the engineers, initially during beta testing, then earlier in the design phase so that I could try to head off UI problems from the start, rather than be told later: “We won’t have time to fix that til the next release.”

And I worked directly on the UI, writing and editing text strings for dialog boxes, etc. This was obviously a job for a tech writer: the clearer the messages onscreen, the less I would have to explain in the manual.

Collaborating with the Community

Around 1993, I had begun to interact daily with customers online, and soon learned to value their knowledge. No QA (quality assurance) or tech writing team can spend as many hours with a product as a large pool of users will collectively spend with it, nor can an internal team hope to duplicate all the diverse situations in which customers will use it. When we tap into what customers know about our products, both sides benefit.

In the mid-90s, I was an active participant on Usenet forums, answering questions where I could, keeping an eye on hot issues, and conveying customers’ knowledge and issues back to the company. (NB: By late ’95/early ’96 I had handed off my manual-writing job.)

In 1996, I launched a moderated, email-based discussion list which fulfilled the same functions, but in a more controlled and congenial atmosphere. The same concept is seen today in discussion forums run by companies on company sites (which may not be moderated or even monitored).

My role as a tech writer in these virtual meeting places was to work with users to find answers to problems, then to “pretty up” and post that information to the website and, in the longer term, write it into the documentation and/or take note of it in future product design.

I did not originate all this new material (that wouldn’t have been humanly possible!), but my deep knowledge of the technology and ability to write about it in layman’s terms made me ideally suited to fit this new “outside” information into the bigger picture – I was now more a knowledge editor and manager than a writer.

Where I did create original material, it was usually in response to customer FAQs and other expressed or observed customer needs. By staying close to customers and interacting with them daily, I kept a finger on the pulse and knew what they needed/wanted, sometimes before they knew themselves. I considered myself a conduit for information between customers and the company, translating from user-speak to engineer-speak (or boss-speak) where necessary.

New Tools

In the six years since I quit my job with Roxio, the technologies available for online communication and collaboration have, of course, moved on. We now have two very powerful new tools: blogs and wikis. How should we use them, and other new tools that will doubtless show up in the future? That’s a topic for another article.

Your thoughts? If you’re a tech writer, how have you seen your role evolving, and what do you anticipate for the future?

what I do

40 Years Online: Communicating on the Internet Since 1982

October 17, 2007 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Note: This is a heavily revised version of an article that I originally wrote around 2001, now updated for this year’s “significant” anniversary. 25 years online seems like a milestone worth marking!

I can say without hubris that I have a talent for communicating online. Which shouldn’t be surprising: I’ve been doing it for over 25 years.

Continue reading →

what I do

Communicating with Your Customers

October 25, 2006 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Someone anonymous claiming to be an Apple employee launched a blog (now vanished) to discuss his/her thoughts on Apple’s communications with its customers. This was big news in the blogosphere, because Apple is notoriously secretive and uncommunicative.

The only Apple product I own is an iPod (I had a Mac SE 15 years ago, my first and last Macintosh), but I have read the few entries on this new blog, and the accompanying reader comments.

Many of the commenters decry the blogger’s anonymity, saying that it proves that the blog is a fake perpetrated by Apple itself as a publicity stunt. Some blogs have recently come to light claiming to be produced by individuals who “just happen” to love a company or its products so much that they would dedicate time to blogging about it, but these blogs turned out to be funded by the companies in question (e.g., Wal-Mart). Such subterfuge cannot long remain hidden in the teeming online world: when thousands of minds attack a puzzle such as “who’s really behind this blog?”, it gets solved very quickly.

The Apple blogger him/herself points out, reasonably enough, that to be identified by the company could cause her to lose her job (most of the commenters seem to assume the “Masked Blogger” is a man, while I, for no particular reason, think she’s a woman).

The Masked Blogger’s avowed purpose is to start a conversation about what Apple could be doing to communicate better with its customers. She’s asking the right questions, and some of the answers are useful. It therefore doesn’t matter whether the blog is genuine, because Apple is reading it. Whether they read it to see how their PR experiment works out, or to try to identify their rogue employee, the conversation about conversation is taking place – and Apple, volente o nolente*, is listening.

Whether they will learn anything is another question. It surprises me that this conversation is still needed. All the “new wisdom” floating around the blogosphere about how companies should communicate with their customers (the current vogue, of course, is that they should use blogs) follows principles that I invented for myself over ten years ago, starting in CompuServe forums (yes, I am a geek antique).

You want to communicate with your customers online? It’s not rocket science.

The basic principles are:

Be honest. This doesn’t mean that you need to spill your guts and tell every company secret, but everything you do say must be absolutely true. And, when you know there’s a problem that affects customers, say so, especially if asked point-blank. Don’t imagine that you can pretend ignorance, or hide behind spin and subterfuge – you can’t.
Be real. Not every problem is going to get fixed quickly and not every customer is going to be happy. If you explain what steps are being taken and how soon you (reasonably) expect them to take effect, customers are surprisingly forgiving. Most will love you just for showing that you’re listening and trying to help. Sometimes you can’t fix a problem; not everything customers say they want is even possible. When I worked for Adaptec/Roxio, I frequently used the line: “Fast, cheap, or perfect – pick two.” Most customers understand that businesses cannot supply everything for nothing. If you can give a reasonable explanation for why you can’t do what they’re demanding, or can’t do it as fast as they would like, they get it. And they appreciate being spoken to like capable adults. Weasel-speak only shows contempt for your listener; no one likes that.
Be yourself. Perhaps because I started out “talking” to people personally in forums (and never wrote marketing copy for a living), it always came naturally to write in my own voice. I was surprised at how well people responded to this, telling me: “we, as customers, like the feeling that we are dealing with a real person, not a machine producing corporate ‘happytalk’.” NB: This did not mean that they wanted to hear about my vacations or what I ate for lunch or my views on politics, nor did it mean that I could tell someone he was an idiot even when I thought so – I represented the company and, when you do that, you ALWAYS have to be polite. And careful: sarcasm usually backfires online, and even mild irony gets over-interpreted.
Be strong. It’s a hard job, representing a company online. You’re highly visible: when the shit hits the fan, you’re the first to get spattered. Because people are accustomed to being treated badly by every other company, their default assumption is that you, too, are out to screw them, that your niceness is just a ploy, it’s all a PR stunt, etc.NB: OF COURSE it’s a PR stunt – everything that you do in the name of your company where a customer can “see” you is marketing and PR (whether you – or your company – realize it). Every employee in any company who ever has contact with a customer has a chance to make or break the company’s reputation – maybe just with that one customer, maybe with many who will hear by word of mouth about that customer’s experience. What is that if not PR?
Be prepared for suspicion and abuse. Just keep smiling, and nice them to death. Trolls get bored quickly, and they are a small minority, no matter how loud. The silent majority will respect your patience, good manners, and tolerance. In fact, if you hold out long enough, they will start leaping to defend you!
Believe. Being nice under duress does take a psychic toll, so you’d better be doing it for a company, product, or cause that you believe in. And it’s fine to defend your belief passionately: people respond to passion, even if they don’t necessarily agree with you on its target.

Okay, I’ve told you everything you need to know. Now get out there and talk to your customers!

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Tag Archives: what I do

2007 in Review

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Workspaces – “Office” is Where the Laptop Is

40 Years Online: Communicating on the Internet Since 1982

Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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Prologue: The Dead Tree Society

Moving It Online

Usability

Collaborating with the Community

New Tools

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia