Salad Is Slaughter

I had just hung up the phone after speaking with my lovely bride, picked up my book (The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman) and got about halfway in to the first sentence of the chapter when it hit.  The house started shaking, the dogs starting barking, and the cats fled for cover.  Last night was the first decent sized earthquake we’ve had in a while.

How can you describe what being in an earthquake is like?  The ground shakes, the house vibrates, knickknacks rattle, glass clinks and things sway.  That’s the physical part but it doesn’t describe what’s in your gut.  You can feel that the quake is pretty big but you don’t know how long it will last.  You don’t know if it’s going to fade away or hit you with a sudden, big jolt.  Things are a bit out of your control at this point.

After about 10 or 12 seconds of rumbling I was considering getting off of the couch and moving to a doorway.  For those who don’t live in an area where earthquakes happen, under a heavy table or braced in a doorway are the safest places to be inside a building.  If the building starts to crumble, those areas offer your best protection.  One of the worst things you can do is to run outside while the quake is tossing things around because you stand a good chance of something landing on you.

As I was thinking about moving to a more protected area, the earthquake stopped.  I calmed the dogs down, gave up looking for the cats, and checked out the house.  Absolutely no damage.  Nothing fell off shelves, nothing broke, nothing fell over.  The only impact at my house was a brief adrenaline rush.

I sat down to continue my book and Nala jumped on my lap.  That little cat was glued to me for the next hour.  Boo finally showed up as well.  I expected her to be in hiding for days since she’s a bit of a fraidy cat, but she was a real trooper.  The dogs calmed down pretty quickly as well.

You can read more about the quake here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/31/MNCAT3RA1.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/31/MN7FOGO71.DTL

Since Jim did it, I will too.

You Are A Vampire

You have a real thirst for bliss, and you consider yourself a true hedonist. And you’re not afraid to walk alone in life, if it means getting what you truly crave. You truly enjoy entrancing people. Not to mention the ensuing pleasures of the flesh. Your tastes have been called decadent and bizarre. You usually give in to your temptations, no matter how primalYour greatest power: Your flawless ability to seduce and charm Your greatest weakness: Human flesh You play well with: Werewolves

What Kind of Monster Are You?

Technology makes it difficult to tell if a person is crazy, or just talking on the phone.  Case in point:  yesterday at lunch someone at a table next to me started talking about a Saturday Night Live skit.  She was alone and just started talking, no hello, no intro comments, nothing.  Like she jumped in to the middle of a conversation when she had been silent for a good 15 minutes.  I didn’t see an earpiece, but maybe it was hidden or really small.  At this point I’m leaning toward “crazy” but how can you be sure.

The Sharks finally played a decent game last night - I’ve been looking forward to the debut of Devin Setoguchi and he didn’t disappoint - but I still think Ron Wilson should be shown the door.  Until last night the team has been looking unmotivated, untalented, ill-prepared, and sloppy.

I tried one of those frozen chili things where you just add beans and it was (charitably) not very good; about on par with canned chili.  Janet is out of town and I wanted something quick.  I should have just made homemade chili.

I’ve been looking forward to part 3 of Southpark’s Imaginationland episode, but Wednesday is Halloween and I’ll be handing out candy all night.  I’m recording it for Janet and I’ll have to watch that.

Mike finally puts something in his blog after a three and a half month lapse, and the best he can do is a recycled joke?

Fox Announces New Reality Show

Programming executives at the Fox network announced this week that they will be scheduling a new reality show for next season starring Wendy the Retard.  Wendy the Retard first became famous on the Howard Stern syndicated radio show and continues to be a regular caller.

“People have been telling us that we hit rock bottom with The Simple Life, staring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie,” said Fox spokesman Monica Caldwell.  “Well, we at Fox think we can go even lower than The Simple Life, and Wendy the Retard is going to take us to the promised land.  When we found out that she was a real person who just called in to Stern’s show and that Howard didn’t have her under contract, we jumped at the opportunity to sign her for this project.”

The show, tentatively titled A Tard’s Life, will chronicle the daily life of this favorite member of Howard Stern’s Wack Pack.  The show’s producers envision Wendy going out on dates with men chosen by Fox.  These dates might include nights at a karaoke bar, bowling, and dining at elegant five-star restaurants.

“Wendy the Retard’s singing is incomparable, and her song writing is cutting edge,” said Caldwell.  “If you’ve never heard her sing an original composition, you don’t know what you’re missing.  We may also take a page from The Simple Life and have Wendy work at various jobs.  The possibilities are endless.

“Critics have been saying that we are responsible for the dumbing-down of America, but we think that we’re educating the public,” said Caldwell.  “We’ve shown that Paris and Nicole are nothing more than parasites who contribute nothing to society and have no concept of reality.  Now we’re going to show that a 300-pound retarded woman is just as good, if not better than, those two bimbos.  If that isn’t educational, I don’t know what is.”

Fox plans to set up a special office to handle the complaints from various Disabled Rights groups.

Posted by: Mike Perative on 12/15/2003 8:36:16 AM

Software Documentation

Dear Dick,

I work for a software company in Southern California.  I have noticed that our technical writing staff seems more interested in grammer than in making the documentation a useful resource for the end user.  Does this seem wrong or am I off base?

William Gates,
Los Angelas, CA

Dear Bill,

You are so off base it’s not even funny.  The first thing that you should remember is that your technical writers may not have an engineering background and probably don’t understand your product.  Even if they do have a technical background they are still correct to concentrate on the grammar and wording of the documentation instead of the technical aspects of the document because if the grammar isn’t correct then misunderstandings can occur.

The problem, Bill is yours and your development team.  When engineers start on their projects they frequently skimp on the documentation.  Sure, they may have the best intentions in the beginning, but as engineering reviews occur, changes get made to the product features, corrections happen, and so on, the last thing that an engineer does is update the documentation.  They just assume that everyone knows what’s going on.  The project documentation is out of date within weeks.

So where does the technical writing staff get their information?  From the engineer’s documents is where.  The technical writers know that the documents that they have are B.S. and that whatever they write will be useless to the end-user.  Their solution is to take the old documentation and put it into a random order.  Next, they use an on-line language translation program to translate the documents into various languages.  For example, they’ll take a section on database configuration and setup and use the translation software to translate it to Spanish, then French, then German, then Portuguese, back to French, then finally back to English.  Then they clean up the grammar and assume that the facts have not changed.

Next the technical writing team will assign letters of the alphabet to each section.  They will pull out their trusty Ouija board and allow the spirits to pick 10 percent of the sections to be omitted from the document.  The writers know that not all of the original features made it into the final product and they depend on the spirit world to tell them what to leave out.

The final step is to add the features to the document that the writers are pretty sure you must have added because people have been asking for them for years.  After a final edit for grammar and spelling the document is returned to you for approval.

Since no one actually reads software documentation, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe if the engineers would do their jobs better and document their projects, that would change.

Posted by: richard e. normus on 12/15/2003 8:35:42 AM