Dana Whitaker: I don’t think you’re cute. I don’t think you’re funny. I don’t think you’re smart. And sometimes… I don’t think you’re very nice.

Casey McCall [anguished]: You don’t think I’m funny?

It has recently come to my attention that there is an alarming shortage of technical writer jokes. Lord knows there’s plenty of engineer jokes and programmer jokes. It’s easy to find physics jokes. Yahoo has an entire category devoted just to silly chemistry songs (including Tom Lehrer’s 1959 opus, The Elements). There are firefighter jokes. Plumber jokes. Social worker jokes. Need accountant jokes? I got your accountant jokes right here. Want actuary jokes? Head on over to actuarialjokes.com.

But there are precious few technical writer jokes. After exhaustive research on the subject,¹ I only found a handful:

• The ubiquitous Dr. Seuss As A Technical Writer poem. Cute!

• A fairly lame technical writer lightbulb joke. Then again, I’ve never really cared for lightbulb jokes,² so I’m probably not the best judge.

• Klingon Technical Writers. (Example: “Indentation?! I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!“) This one would have been promising, except it’s really just a cheap knockoff of an earlier Klingon Programmers joke.

• My own humble contribution to the field, composed during a rather tedious experience making review copies. (Is there any other kind?)

• And of course we can’t forget Tina the Brittle Tech Writer!

In short, the jokes are not exactly thick on the ground. So are we technical writers just not funny? My colleague at work disagrees. “I think everyone just knows that we are simply Not To Be Made Fun Of.”³ Well, that makes me feel better. In any case, if you have any more technical writer jokes, please feel free to send them my way. I’m not exactly going to rush out and register “techwriterjokes.com”, but it’d be nice to see some evidence that there’s more out there. We can at least beat the accountants, for crying out loud.

1. I.e. a cursory Google search.

2. Except for this one. Q: How many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One, but it has to really want to change. Hee hee!

3. Note the skillful closure of the sentence with a preposition. This dangerous grammatical construction is for trained professionals only. Laypersons, do not attempt this at home.

We have all these Devices. We buy these Devices because we think they’ll make our lives a little better or easier; at the very least, we hope that they won’t make our lives worse. And we expect that at some point, the Devices that we cobble together will just work — they won’t crash, they’ll do what we tell them to do, and they’ll communicate with each other seamlessly.

I’m not sure what Digital Nirvana is, but I’ll know it when I see it.

And although it’s a process of trial-and-error, I think I’m headed in the right direction. For example, not so long ago I had a computer that crashed every two or three days. Now I have a computer that has been running almost continuously for the last year and a half, with only two crashes. This is Progress. Other steps are smaller in scope but still important. DragThing. NetNewsWire. A decent web host. Flexible weblog software. The list goes on and on.

Of course, sometimes I make mistakes. For example, a couple of months ago I bought an old Palm VII for twenty bucks at a local garage sale. The guy was a pretty serious geek, judging from the used books he was selling. We bonded. He threw in two serial cradles, a keyboard, and a classy black leather case. Clapped me on the back. “Go forth, young man.” Well, maybe I added that last part. Anyway, I was stoked. I took my very first PDA home and spent an hour going through all the functions, learning Graffiti, generally having a ball. Then I discovered that the only way to sync the Palm with my desktop would be to get a serial-to-USB converter, and that said converters would cost more than I spent for the PDA in the first place. “Huh,” I said. Since then, the Palm VII has sat in my Big Drawer of Extra Cables and Electronic Detritus, safe and sound in its classy black leather case.

Then there was the time I decided that I was tired of writing journal entries in Moveable Type’s tiny little browser textbox, and it was time to find a more elegant interface. So I downloaded a well-known weblog editing tool for OS X and fired it up. I hadn’t configured my site info yet, but I figured what the hell — let’s see what this bad boy can do! I pressed the Connect button, expecting to see some sort of pop-up (“No default blog available. Please enter your URL, name, and password…”). Instead, the program went into a frenzy of trying to access… nothing, apparently, and froze up. Annoyed, I killed the application process and started over. I entered my blog info like a good little user and tried again. Success! At this point, I was afraid to create a new post, so I pulled up a recent entry instead. To my horror, the entry appeared with the whitespace horribly mangled, along with a number of strange tags after each newline “<Unknown Escape>“. Whoa! I don’t know about you, but I consider conversion of newline characters between Linux and Mac OS X to be a solvable problem. Something I sorta kinda expect my weblog editing software to take care of automatically. Now I was really annoyed, and worried that I might overwrite my old entry with a bunch of invalid crud. So I went to close the window, only to suddenly notice that the standard red “close window” button had been inexplicably disabled. Huh?? Sigh. Command-Q, drag folder to Trash.

My latest project: Entering the Wireless World. I’ll admit, it is a bit ambitious of me to set up a wireless hub. My desktop does fine and dandy while wired, and so really only my laptop would benefit. A wireless network of One is not so impressive. But hey, I like to plan ahead.

Civilization is coming to an end. No, really. Consider the following: last Tuesday’s post, which was about tedious markup language minutiae, got seventeen comments. The post right before that, which was about the sleazy goings-on at a bachelor party, got a grand total of one comment. Call me crazy, but when esoteric XHTML issues are considered to be more important than girls in short-shorts, something has gone Seriously Wrong.

Not that I’m complaining about my little three-month experiment with comments. So far the level of discourse has been far better than expected. Tuesday’s post was a perfect example: people who I greatly respect were writing in and discussing the issues at hand in a thoughtful and informative manner. It’s like freakin’ NPR over here. Note that at the same time, poor Mark Pilgrim posted about his experience installing Windows XP and received over 200 helpful comments informing him that “your an idiot” or advising him to “get a Mac.” Yeah, Mark — what are you waiting for?

In other news: last weekend was my ten-year high school reunion. Last year Brian had to practically drag me to my five-year college reunion, which turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought. So I was definitely looking forward to the high school reunion, and the reunion did not disappoint.¹ My only major mistake was in choosing to host a small post-reunion party, thus giving Nancy the opportunity to snicker at the contents of my bachelor’s fridge.² I swear that it was full of vegetables just a couple of days before…

Finally, I’ve started a new job with Chordiant Software. It’s not earthshaking news or anything (“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — CHORDIANT SOFTWARE, INC. ACQUIRES WAYWARD TECH WRITER…”), but I’m pretty excited about it nonetheless. New people to meet, new projects to work on, new software to play with — and a supply closet fully stocked with Swingline staplers. Pinch me!

1. Although unlike last year’s college reunion, nobody proposed marriage to Sherry. Seems like an oversight, but what can you do?

2. Three beers, assorted condiments, and some cheese.

I want a button in Mail that automatically adds contacts to Address Book. Right now Mail has an “Add Sender to Address Book” function, but all it does is add the email address. I want the street, the city, the zip code, the phone numbers… everything.

Some emails include an “electronic business card” as an attachment, usually in a format such as .vcf. Many email applications allow you to drag-and-drop these .vcf files directly into your local address book, which is kind of nifty. However, any enthusiasm we might feel for .vcf attachments must be tempered by the fact that:

• Many people find them to be annoying.
• They present a security risk.
• Most people don’t use them. (I certainly don’t).

Now, what many people do use is a plain text signature:

James Q. Workerbee
ABC Industries, Inc.
12345 Lakeside Dr.
Pleasantville, CA 90021
Tel: 888-555-1234 x567
Fax: 888-555-1021

This certainly isn’t beautifully structured data. It would be a lot easier to retrieve the information if we had standard for, say, passing this information in the email headers or tagging this as XML.¹. That solution would be a lot easier and more fun for the programmers. But this solution depends on:

1. Deciding on a standard.
2. Waiting for email applications to implement the standard.
3. Hoping that users A) notice that this option is available and B) change their behavior in order to make use of the standard.

Rather than all that, let’s take advantage of the thing that users do already. This won’t be easy, because plain text signatures are poorly structured. Still, a phone number looks different from a street number, which looks different from a firstname and lastname, which looks different from arbitrary text, and so on. A cell phone number often starts with c:, cell:, m:, or mobile:. We don’t have million-dollar markup to go on, but there is some structure here.

Anyway, back to The Button. When you select the button, the parser makes its best guess at person’s contact information. An Address Book window appears with the information filled in. You can then save the information, edit it, or dismiss it unsaved (if the parser’s results are total garbage). As long as the failure rate is low enough, this would be a pretty sweet little feature. Admittedly, it’s not the easiest application feature to build. But ladies and gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology. Mail.app will be that application. Better than it was before. Better… stronger… faster…

Whoops, got carried away there.

1. For all I know there are standards for doing this, in which case Step #1 is obviated.

When you finally finish the first draft of a technical manual, you can’t help experiencing a sublime feeling of accomplishment.

And there’s nothing that deflates this feeling faster than wasting an hour babysitting the copy machine, waiting for the inevitable paper jam or system crash or whatever. Ugh. It’s all so mundane and tedious. Sometimes I try to pass the time by imagining that the process is… well, more epic or something…

Three Drafts for the QA team, on whom one can rely,
Seven for the Engineers, who do naught but bitch and moan,
Nine for the Managers with deadlines nigh,
One for the VP on his dark throne
In the land of Marketing, where the shadows lie.
One Manual to rule them all, One Manual to find them,
One Manual to explain it all, and at the Kinko’s bind them.

Nope, that didn’t really help.

Up until four days ago, I had been buying maybe three albums a year at best. But then I downloaded iTunes 4, complete with the unobtrusive little “Music Store” button in the corner. Now it’s open season. So far I’ve bought about six or seven albums worth of music in four days. This constitutes an increase in my rate of buying music of roughly 17,000%. (Ahh, extrapolation.)

So in light of that, it’s a good thing I have a new writing contract. I have to say that I’m quite pleased with my current employers. When I arrived at work on the first morning, not only did I have a phone number and a valid email address, not only could I connect to the web and the intranet, but I could even see printers out on the network. But wait, there’s more… when I opened my desk drawer, I discovered that they had given me a Swingline stapler. Not a red Swingline stapler, but a Swingline stapler nonetheless. It doesn’t get much better than this, folks.

Anyway, in other news: I’ve decided to open up comments on this journal. Here’s why. In the discussion on Jacques Distler’s weblog about my earlier post about XHTML standards compliance, Phil Ringnalda had some thoughtful comments about the worthiness of my “Test #3”, comments that I need to factor in to my thinking. But Phil also commented:

“I wonder how long it will be before those of us with comments enabled think twice about linking to a weblog post without comments, knowing that we will become the comment host for that entry, for our readers.”

For a long time, I’ve specifically disallowed comments on this journal. Partly because I’ve never viewed this site as a “public forum”. Partly because it could end up being a PITA to spend time squashing spam and hateful/racist comments. But mostly because there is nothing sadder than seeing a journal with post after post ending with “Comments (0)”. This is not really a problem for the Alphas, but for the rest of us… well, web logging is self-indulgent enough. We might as well not call attention to the fact that we are shouting out into the wilderness.

Despite all that, Phil has a point. I posted a piece that lends itself to discussion — and I didn’t provide any communications facility other than emailing me directly. This barrier was too high, which is really too bad. I’ve read Phil Ringnalda in the past, and I consider him to be one of the Alphas who really has put some serious thought into standards and their implementation on his site. Not to mention that my thinking certainly hasn’t crystallized on these MIME-type issues yet. So perhaps I missed an opportunity for an educational discussion — if so, that was a blown call.

Thus, an experiment: comments are now open on all subsequent posts. (And on the XHTML 100.) If they turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth, or if nobody is bothering to enter any, I’ll just end the experiment. (Of course, this doesn’t preclude me from padding the numbers by starting arguments with myself.)

The public beta 2 of Safari is out. Up until recently I had only been playing with it. But the latest version is faster than Mozilla, and it seems more stable than Mozilla, and now it has tabs — and that’s good enough for me.

Not to say Safari doesn’t have its little quirks. For example, today I discovered a bug where list items can bleed over into right-floating divs (see the simplified test page). Mark Pilgrim has been kind enough to add the bug to his unofficial list of Safari bugs, and I’ve also submitted the bug to Apple using the built-in bug report tool, so we’ll see how it goes.

In other web design news, I’ve moved all of my MOTWM class notes to the new template, and I’ve also posted a whole slew of notes that had been sitting around in my notebook for months. So if you’re in the class and you’ve been missing out on the notes, my apologies — go get ’em while they’re hot. Bill has asked that I not provide the URL directly on this site, but the URL is quite guessable. If you can’t figure out what the URL to MOTWM on goer.org could be, then send me an email and I’ll send you the link. Ah, security through obscurity. It’s a beautiful thing.

Finally, a hearty congratulations to Justin and his wife Dana, who are now the proud parents of an 8lb 12oz baby boy named Kevin Davis. They grow ’em plump and healthy over at the Miller household. Despite this good news, I am forced to conclude that some people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid going to Poker Night when I’m on a winning streak. I wonder what excuse Justin is going to pull out this week? “I’ve got a really late meeting tonight.” “My wife is going into labor.” Pfft. Whatever, Justin.