Technically Speaking

Today’s quick update includes two sites I recently found while Stumbling.

World Clock

I stumbled upon a site that uses statistics from various government and non-profit entities to show a world clock that displays the population growth, death rates and causes, and other information for a specific period of time. For example, you can see (based on statistical averages) how many people in the world have died of AIDS this year, this month, this week, or today. (As of right now, 3,930 people have died from AIDS today.) Today there have already been 58,000 abortions, and 14,000 people have been diagnosed with cancer. Its really quite sobering.

Pandora Radio

Another site I stumbled across last week was Pandora Radio. This is a site that allows you to pick an artist, then Pandora creates a radio station for you based on that artist. You can customize the station by adding new artists/songs, and by rating songs that Pandora plays. The service is free at the basic level. You can create a membership (also free) to remember your station across computers or sessions. There is even an pay-option that removes advertisements from the radio stream. It’s pretty darn cool for free. I’ve been using Yahoo!’s Launchcast Plus player for a couple of years, but I found Pandora to be a great free alternative that was easier to configure in order to get songs I liked. I also like that with Pandora, if I give a song a thumbs down, the song immediately stops and a new song plays in its place.

One negative of Pandora compared to Launchcast Plus is that Pandora seems to be choppier on occasion, especially if I open a webpage that is graphic intensive, where Launchast Plus was generally pretty impervious to other things happening in my web browser. But again, Pandora is free. And for free, it’s pretty darn impressive.

So it has been quite a while since I checked in here at TS; a little over a month actually. After my last post, I was in quite a hurry to finish a project at work so I could leave on vacation. Then I took a two week vacation back east, which was wonderful. When we got back, I was swamped with a new project at work and other personal responsibilities. There seemed to be so much going on, that any attempt to blog would require recounting everything so it was easier to say nothing. Well, now I’ve just decided to move on and move forward without trying to catch up on the stories I missed. Oh well.

On the personal front, our little boy has started pulling himself up on things. Its quite adorable, but we found out how un-baby-proof our house actually is. We’re rushing like mad to try to organize things around the house to make it so we don’t have to worry every ten seconds that he is getting himself into something that is hazardous or dangerous. I’m trying to figure out how to attach bookcases and such to walls to they won’t tip forward if a little body tries to climb on them, and we’re getting all the safety devices to keep little fingers out of plug sockets and curious eyes and hands out of dangerous cupboards.

On the professional front, things are going well with work, but I haven’t had a lot of time to work with the new Flare 3.0. I had to work on an older branch of my documentation that is still being done in FrameMaker, so I set Flare aside for a while to keep the older branch moving. I expect to be using Flare again in the next couple of weeks as I make updates to my project that is already in Flare. By fourth quarter I should be doing full Flare documentation, which will be nice. It’s kind of frustrating to bounce back and forth between authoring tools. I get so used to the way Flare does things, and I feel so limited by the way Frame does them (especially since I’m using Frame 7.0; and no, I don’t plan to upgrade to Frame 8 because I’m migrating away from Frame as my primary authoring tool).

I still need to get back to my series on structured authoring. It is coming soon. I think it is a valuable topic, and a discussion of tools will be useful for other technical writers who are trying to understand the concepts.

Anyway, I’m back, and I’ll be posting again soon. Thanks for waiting.