cellio | Entries tagged with sigdoc

(Written Wednesday.)

On the ground Atlanta was dark and dreary, but as we emerged above the cloud layer the view was (and still is) breath-taking. The sun is nearly at the horizon (that is, the cloud-horizon), and the yellow-orange light plays beautifully across the "ripples" in the clouds. Baruch ma'aseh b'reishit (blessed is the source of creation), or words to that effect. (There actually is an appropriate blessing for situations like this, but I don't know what it is and my siddur is in the overhead compartment.)

If there was any doubt before now, I now know that the travel agent who booked my flights isn't touching my future travel. I'm too big for middle seats on airplanes. Sheesh. Fortunately, that was only for the Memphis-Atlanta leg. The flight from Atlanta to Pittsburgh is sparse enough that I wonder about choice of plane. How far in advance do they have to commit to the plane, I wonder? Do they even take purchased tickets into account, or do they just have heuristics about the source, destination, time of day, and day of week?

( some conference notes )

( food )

Short takes:

Either the wireless card or its configuration for this laptop is broken. (So maybe the Pittsburgh airport does have wireless access after all.) Fortunately, the wired access worked fine, so I could access the net from my hotel room if not from the conference center.

FedEx sponsored a building ("FedEx Institute of Technology") at University of Memphis. (This is where the lab we toured on Monday is.) It was a little odd to hear people talking about "running over to FedEx" when they weren't talking about shipping packages. :-)

I didn't know that the idea of design patterns existed in (physical) architecture long before it existed in computer science. The relevant name here is Christopher Alexander.

Michael Priestley (from IBM in Toronto) looks really really familiar, and he thought the same about me. We were both at SIGDOC in 2000, but I don't think my memory is that good, and I don't think I did anyhthing to draw attention to myself there. (It was a larger conference, so it was easier to be invisible.) I wonder if I know him from somewhere else and, if so, where. I'll have to see what Google says about him. (I wonder if he'll be doing the same thing. :-) )

The attendance seemed to be about evenly divided between academics and industry folks. You could sometimes tell that they live in different worlds.

I'm back. I wrote a longer entry on the plane, but I can't get the laptop to talk to the home network and it has neither a floppy drive nor a CD burner, so it'll just have to wait. (It talked to the office network just fine last week, so I assume I can rescue data tomorrow.)

An interesting possibility for collaboration developed tonight. I spoke for a while with another programming-minded writer who has some good ideas for modeling documentation for maintainability and modularity. We might work together on this.

On a different subject, the folks at the Institute for Intelligent Systems are doing some nifty work on assessing effectiveness of text (and other content). One of their systems, QUAID, evaluates survey questions (e.g. for pollsters, the census bureau, etc); it shouldn't be too surprising that a lot of people don't actually understand the questions before they answer them, and they confirmed this with (among things) eye-tracking devices. Anyway, the tool suggests modifications; it doesn't compose text. But it did a pretty good job on the examples we threw at it.

Along similar lines, Coh-Metrix suggests improvements to the readability of arbitrary text passages. (The "coh" is from "coherence".) Often their suggestions are not the ones that come from those "simplified reading level" efforts popular with school texts. In fact, they found that precisely following those guidelines actually hinders above-average readers, because sometimes you need to not connect all the dots to stimulate analytical thinking by the reader. Spoon-feed it and some people never actually absorb it. Interesting.

AutoTutor uses NLP techniques that seem familiar (:-) ) to build dialogue into tutoring software. So the software poses a problem to the student, the student types questions, candidate solutions, and random speculation into a window, and the tutor responds in ways that are mostly appropriate to guide that student toward the answer. They're using latent semantic analysis, comparing the student's utterances to an ideal answer. Kind of like the way Clarit retrieval works, it sounds like.

Attendance is about 50/50 writers and programmers. This is, apparently, typical for SIGDOC.

I'm getting some ideas for ways to better QA our documentation, though none fully formed yet. Tomorrow has some promising sessions toward that end.

Tonight at the opening reception I spent some time talking with Bob Newman. In doing the "so what does your company do?" thing, I told him about CoMotion and CPOF and he seemed very interested. He sees what we do as "design of communication" -- not all communication involves words, after all, and the principles that apply to organizing data are sometimes the same ones that apply to organizing documentation. This is a good point. (Unbeknownest to me, the "DOC" in "SIGDOC" actually changed from "documentation" to "design of communication" a couple years back, in part to attract a broader audience.)

It turns out that Bob is the chair of next year's conference, and the theme is "documenting and designing for pervasive information". He would like to see a paper submission from us. Now maybe he says that to all the writers, but it's worth thinking about. (And the conference doesn't conflict with the high holy days next year either, so I could theoretically go.)

After the reception a couple guys from SAS in Raleigh and I headed out for dinner. One of them had been to Memphis before, so we let him guide us to Beale Street. It's hard to tell from just tonight's data points, but my tentative conclusion is that vegetarians are just SOL in this town, or at least on Beale Street. (I haven't looked into the hotel restaurant yet.)

The hotel is pretty spiffy, especially for the price ($95 plus tax). I have a two-room suite with microwave and fridge, though there are no dishes so I assume the microwave is intended for frozen dinners or something. There's a TV in each room (which is two more than I need but there's plenty of space so I don't care), and free network access (wired) in the room. The one downside is that my room is just off the lobby and it's noisy in the outer room, but the noise doesn't seem to carry into the bedroom so I don't care all that much.

This laptop is much worse than the one I borrowed this summer in one respect: legibility. More specifically, I can't find any controls, physical or digital, that affect contrast and brightness, and the defaults are harsh (to me). Dell laptop running XP Professional, in case anyone's got ideas. (The "native" resolution is also high for such a small screen, so I've got fonts cranked up both at the OS level and in my apps. But still, the brightness makes it hard to use.)

As I write this, I am sitting in Atlanta. I had been under the impression that pretty much all major airports had wireless internet access by now, but I found no evidence of it in either Pittsburgh or Atlanta. Either that or the driver on this borrowed laptop is misconfigured; since I don't have wireless at home and was specifically told not to use it at work with this machine, I had no way to test that. Oh well. If the access in the hotel is wired, as I suspect, then it's not much of an issue. (Added later: it's wired.)

So, wave hi to dragontdc; sorry I visited your fair city without actually making contact.

My flights today are on AirTran, whose web site would not allow me to print a boarding pass from home. Fooey on them. The first kiosk I tried was broken (the "E" key was broken and was a required component of my confirmation number). But the lines were short, so no biggie.

In Pittsburgh I was the lucky winner of detailed security scrutiny. That hand scanner sure is sensitive. I wasn't all that surprised that it beeped on my belt buckle -- just a minimal buckle, mind, without big ornaments or the like -- but was surprised that it beeped on the (metal) button on my pants and on my (small, thin) necklace. Oh, and there was something in my wallet that it didn't like, though I still don't know what. (No, my wallet does not have a zippered or snapped compartment. It's really just a billfold with some pockets for credit cards.)

There's a new (to me) addition to the takeoff/landing spiel. Seatbelts, blah blah... tray tables, blah, blah... window blinds? They care that the blinds be up? I wonder why. By the time someone standing in the aisle can look out the side windows and see an oncoming plane, it's too late.

Ah, there's no wireless because they sell network access (via a data port) for 50 cents per minute. Ok, that's fair. (Added later: but it's a phone jack, not a network plug.)

Apropos of nothing, I've been reading (over Shabbat and on the plane) Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice by Rabbi Mark Washofsky. Very interesting read, emphasizing many of the same points I do about Reform being a serious movement, and giving reasons behind some of the decisions where reform has deviated from the norm (such as the so-called "patrilineal descent" and getting rid of the second day of yom tov). I haven't finished it yet, but so far I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know what Reform is really about.

Today I asked one of our administrative assistants -- who, I'd like to stress, is very competent in my experience -- for the confirmation number I'd need for my plane ticket for SIGDOC. In retrospect, it's good that I didn't wait until the last minute to ask for that.

It seems that our travel agent sent us an itinerary for the flight -- in August, when we made these arrangements -- and then never booked the flight. That flight is now expensive (because it leaves this Sunday), so when they discovered the error they put me on a cheaper flight that leaves four hours earlier, apparently without consulting anyone at my company first. My coworker asked if the new flight would be ok.

I looked at it and told her that I didn't want to be a nuissance, but a 10AM departure on Sunday -- when I don't need to be in Memphis until evening -- really does not bring me much joy. (When you work it backwards, allowing for airport lead time and transportation, that's pretty freaking early. Heck, this flight has me arriving two hours before I can check into the hotel, even.) I suggested, however, that we shouldn't be the ones to eat the cost on this. The travel agent screwed up, and that company should make good on the original flight at the original price. My coworker agreed that I am not being unreasonable.

We'll find out tomorrow, I guess -- it was after 5:00 when this came up, so they were already gone for the day. I hope they are smart and decent enough to just fix this. I of course don't know what our contract with them says, but we have a confirmation from them.

My mind boggles. They forgot to actually make the reservation?! This is a travel agent we're talking about! Do they do this often?

The administrative-support folks at my company are fabulous. The most recent instance of this comes from a conference I'll be attending this fall. After I finally got an authorizing signature on the relevant form (which took weeks), I asked about implementation. "Oh, [name] will take care of that for you." That was Friday. I now have a hotel registration, a better plane ticket than I'd been able to find on my own, and conference registration, with me not having to do anything more than provide the URL and approve the flight. Nifty. Not that I've done this a lot, but at every past employer I've had to do the leg-work -- and, by the way, buffer some things on my own credit card.

(ACM SIGDOC, the best conference I know of for technical technical writers. I wonder if I know anybody in Memphis, or anyone else who's going.)

SIGDOC is in Toronto this year (in October). The call for papers is on the vague side, and I'm never any good at figuring out how to fit things I know into vague outlines in CFPs. I wonder if I should pursue this.

(No, I don't actually know if my employer would send me. They'd probably be more likely to if I were out there making a good name for our company, though.)

Current Mood: contemplative

Monica

notes from 29,000 feet

(no subject)

conference notes

SIGDOC, first evening

en route

travel snafu

fast turn-around

(no subject)

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