I've spent the past two days at the STC Toronto spring conference and I'm very glad I chose this one to spend time and money on. It had a lot of attractions from the start (location: Mississauga, just minutes from home; free parking, gotta love that!), not least of which was its theme, kind of cheesily expressed, but nonetheless what I am interested in, "Preparing for the Content Management Tipping Point."

Yesterday's first presenter, Saul Carliner, gave us the information design context, the theoretical groundwork for the speakers to follow. I am familiar with his material, but he reinforced the value of the information design work that I do, and gave me more ways to express it to clients.

The afternoon was devoted to Information Mapping, and the less said about that presentation, the better. I applaud the structured writing principles it is based on, but the sales pitch for this very expensive proprietary methodology wasn't even intelligently crafted.

This morning, Michael Priestly gave an excellent introduction to DITA, which takes structured writing principles into an open standard that has much to offer content publishers. It was born from IBM's tech writing needs, but appears to have enough flexibility to be useful in other genres.

This afternoon, Scott Abel, a self professed content wrangler with an earnest passion for technology that can make our working lives easier, skipped lightly through the latest tech trends and delivered an entertaining session with real meaning. I was familiar, at least in passing, with most of the developments he talked about, but the value I got from his talk was the connections he made, the value potential, how each of these new things, like RSS, tag clouds, structured blogging, can make our lives different, and, yes, often better.

Tomorrow: the last day of the conference offers a session on content reuse and a workshop promising best practices for content management.

Posted by lynda at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've spent lots of time in the last couple of weeks getting to know my new desktop computer, which came with the latest Mac OS, Tiger. Tiger isn't exactly new, but I'm not an early adopter. I was able to field test it with all of my work and play applications while my laptop was still standing by, just in case. Within a few days I was smitten with its wonderfulness and ready to upgrade the laptop as well. So now both of my workspaces match and even synchronize with each other with some minor effort from me. Don't you love technology when it works!

The new machine came with a skateboarding video game(!). I could barely watch the intro movie, remembering Evan's broken jaw from rollerblading a few years ago. Oddly, watching kids on bikes doesn't remind me of Noel breaking his leg. It's seeing kids in casts, or seeing doctors put the saw to a cast on a kid's leg -- that vision will never leave me. He was fine pretty quickly after the trip to the hospital, except for needing repairs to his cast, but the fear I felt watching the blade inching down to his leg to take the cast off still gives me shivers.

On the non-tech side of life, Claire and I enjoyed dinner and a play this week, now that she has evenings free. Last week she finished her hunter safety course to get her provincial hunting licence. Fear not, gentle readers, she shuns the plaid shirt and earflapped cap, but simply wants to legally go forward to learn falconry, where the bird is classified as the "firearm."

Posted by lynda at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is a good day to spare a thought for my only known (so far) Irish ancestor, Ann Elizabeth Connley, my grandfather's grandmother. A family story says she spoke only Gaelic when she was married in 1855, at 20, in Ashted, near Birmingham, to a plumber in his mid-twenties who was already a widower. The record of her marriage shows that she couldn't write her name. She had at least 9 children in the following 16 years, losing two little girls before they were 10. By the time her two youngest sons reached their twenties, she was widowed herself and living with them.

These scant facts leave much to the imagination, even with what we know about Birmingham, booming in the 19th century into the second most populous area in Britain, thanks in large part to an influx of workers, including some from as far away as Ireland. The grim factories meant a future for the brass workers and gas fitters, chandelier makers and pearl button polishers. It could also mean homelessness and hunger if a breadwinner died. Her second youngest son died at 35, leaving his own six children with their destitute mother.

Here's to you, Ann.

Posted by lynda at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, enough of feeling guilty about not posting to this blog. Excuses? Got a million of 'em. All boring and lame. Now I'm back and ready to talk yer ear off.

First up, today's "hey look at this" from Albert of Bubbleshare featuring Will Wright, the amazing brain with jaw-dropping imagination behind the videogame SimCity, talking about his new creation, Spore. I am not a gamer, but Albert recommended this for user experience people, and that I am. As Albert says, we can learn from people whose goal in life is to create addictive user experiences.

My recent work doesn't even get into the ballpark of addictive, experience-wise, but still it has been challenging and satisfying. My task is usually to figure out how to make a boring, complicated, or perhaps just less-than-rivetting message appealing enough for a user to spend some time with. And then, how to make the solution appeal to the client who is the source of the message. Every time, what it comes down to is being passionate about your ideas. If you can truly articulate your passion, you can leave the field with honour, no matter what the outcome.

Posted by lynda at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)