Ryan Pollack's Page
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Ryan Pollack's discussions
Firefox 3 Beta
Replied Apr 14
Technically Speaking
What We Do
One of the tech writers here at NI Shanghai has posted a great entry describing what she does all day. Now, we don't do all of this stuff every day. But a large majority of it will be done over the course of a week or so. At any rate, it's a great peek into just what life is like at the office -- because I know you all were curious about exactly that :-)
No English Spoken Here
I've never had the opportunity to learn a foreign language before, outside of the pidgin-Spanish I can remember from 7th-8th grade. Coming to Shanghai and attempting to learn Mandarin has been an adventure. A frustrating and difficult adventure, but a worthwhile and rewarding one also.
At the same time as I'm trying to learn a new language (or at least get some basic handle on it), I'm reviewing
Non-trivial Typos
From now on, I'm going to start filing typos as bug reports that are far more serious than "trivial".
Barry Bonds seized on a pair of typos, complaining in court papers Thursday that the government's mistakes could compromise his chances for a fair trial. The typographical errors showed up in a recent filing by prosecutors wrongly accusing Bonds of flunking a drug test in 2001. They later
Digital Reviewing
For the 3+ years I've been at NI, I have been reviewing documents by printing out hard copies and distributing them to reviewers. However, now that I am doing more reviewing than writing, I've fallen in love with the commenting features of Adobe Reader. The process works like this:
Create CHM or PDF files.
Print CHM file to a PDF file. We can do this because we have Acrobat installed.Enable PDF
From a Distance
(Side note: Every time I see the acronym for Subject Matter Expert, I think of Smee from Captain Hook. Every time.)
Through a co-worker's blog, I came across a post about sitting near your SME at the office. I cannot agree more emphatically. At NI, most of technical writers sit in the same general location as the engineers for whom they write documentation. For most of my three years here, I
Profile
- Job Title:
- Documentation Team Lead
- Company Name:
- National Instruments
- About Me:
- I'm a Staff Technical Writer at National Instruments in Austin, TX. Currently I'm based in Shanghai, helping to train and manage a team of technical writers.
- Website:
- http://lvtechspeak.blogspot.com
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Content Management – A blessing and a curse or how I became overhead…
As I sit here in Bora Bora, I can finally take a breath. It’s 6 pm. I have been trying since 5 pm to tear myself away from my cube so that I could take a few minutes to clarify my thoughts regarding our Content Management System. Lest you think I am sitting on a [...]
Serving Multiple Touch-points – Old School Tricks
As the old adage goes, “It costs more to find a customer than to keep a customer”. You can keep your customers satisfied by knowing them better and serving up the most appropriate content in the form that suits them best. In the old days, we could get by using manual means to manipulate corporate [...]
The Flavors of CM: Content Management vs Document Management
There are many different perspectives around on what content management is and isn’t and what a Content Management system needs to do. According to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, “A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. CMSs [...]
Steve Manning speaking at IPCC 2008 Conference
Steve Manning speaking at the IPCC 2008 Conference on July 13-16, 2008 in Montreal, QC.
Ann Rockley speaking at DocTrain Life Sciences Conference
Ann Rockley will be speaking at the DocTrain Life Sciences Conference on June 23-26, 2008 in Indianapolis, IN.
© 2008 Created by Scott Abel
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