Archive for the 'Personal' Category

I recently started blocking ads in my browser. I don’t actually mind advertising, and I resisted blocking ads for a long time. I understand that some sites rely on ad revenue to earn a living, and I’m fine with that.

Why, then, have I started blocking ads?

Simple. Companies that insist on using tricks to try to force you to look at ads you don’t want to see. Pop-up and pop-under ads, for example.

Worse, to me, is those ads that pop up if you simply mouse over text in the middle of a news story. This is the epitome of skanky behavior on the part of advertisers. It’s offensive and disruptive. This is why I block ads now. If advertisers would simply realize, “Hey, if we only put some ads here and there in the main page and refrain from making them stunningly distracting, from interfering with the actual usability of the site,” then I would be perfectly happy to turn off the ad blockers and let the ads back into my life.

Until then, I’ll block the ads.

I haven’t blogged for a while. Things have been… well, busy. Between having the flu twice over the fall (which I did blog about), then pneumonia, then the crazy amount of writing I’m trying to get done for Firefox 3.6 (which may be a relatively small release, but given the compressed timeline is actually a lot of writing work to do very fast), things have been quite complicated.

On top of all that, right after Thanksgiving, my wife’s sister was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, and things have been upended around here while we try to help out with various things. That situation will continue to develop and be complicated for the foreseeable future.

Then last week, a close family friend (a very nice lady who was like a grandmother to me when we lived overseas) became seriously ill, and while that hasn’t resulted in any changes to what I need to do, it’s certainly been a distraction.

I’m doing my best to keep up under the circumstances; my apologies for any unanswered emails (I have plenty) or delayed documentation. Everything will get done… eventually.

All that said, we’re starting to get to the point where I’m reasonably happy with the state of the Firefox 3.6 documentation. Yes, there’s stuff left to write, but it’s getting to the point where it’s mostly relatively small (or obscure) stuff, and some “bonus” material that will help smooth out some rough spots.

Please do let me know if you see any issues in the documentation that need to be addressed, and I’ll see what I can do!

Tonight, we all went out to Chili’s for dinner. It was an… interesting experience. We went in, got a table, and all that, no problem. Then our server came around and took our drink order. No problem. While he brought drinks, I debated back and forth between a burger, fajita quesadilla, or fajitas, but finally decided on the fajita quesadilla.

Then it was time to place our order.

Sarah ordered first. Oldtimer burger with American cheese and mayo, nothing else, and onion straws instead of fries.

Sophie ordered next, asking for a grilled cheese and cinnamon apples. We had to repeat “grilled cheese” a couple of times because the server had a hard time hearing it. He joked about it even, laughing about being 60% deaf.

Then I ordered my fajita quesadilla, asking for steak instead of the usual chicken, and some beans, with no guacamole or sour cream.

A couple of minutes later, he comes back and confirms that Sarah wanted her burger with the mayo on the side, which she did, and asks if we’d like Sophie’s food to come out early, which we said would be very nice.

Great.

A few minutes later, he comes out with Sophie’s meal: grilled chicken and cinnamon apples.

So we patiently explained that we’d ordered the grilled cheese, and he apologized and took it away to swap it out. He returned a few minutes later with the sandwich.

Shortly after that, he arrived with the rest of the food. For Sarah, a burger and fries. For me… steak fajitas with beans and extra guacamole. Since I was thinking about the fajitas anyway, I was okay with that, and was able to overlook the guacamole since it was on the side.

Sarah pointed out the fries and requested that he get her onion straws, which he left to do. While he was off doing that, Sarah opened the burger and discovered it had no cheese on it. So when the server returned, she pointed out the lack of cheese and asked him to have them melt some cheese on it. “Swiss?” he asked.

“No, American,” Sarah reminded him. So he headed off with the plate, returning a couple of minutes later with a cold slice of American cheese on top of it. By this point, the comedy of errors is such that she decided not to say anything.

A few minutes later, a manager came along and apologized for the incorrect sandwich (Sophie’s) and the fries thing. We said we understood about Sophie’s meal — “grilled cheese” and “grilled chicken” sound similar enough. But she apparently didn’t realize my order was wrong too. I mentioned that, and that it was okay, and at that point she comped the meal.

There were so many mistakes that we couldn’t be angry about it — especially since the guy was so apologetic about it, and was quick to respond to each mistake. Now, sure, we only tipped him $2 on what would have been a $30 tab, but still…

Happy the gerbil was running around in his exercise ball tonight, when she hopped from the tile to the slightly lower wood floor in the living room, and the lid popped off his ball.

Before we knew it, Happy was on the move, exploring the living room. I got down on my knees and tried to catch him, but of course he was too quick for me. So I got some food and put it out, and he ignored it, and started checking out under the couch, over by my chair, and so on.

So then I tried putting some food in my hand and waited, and while he came and sniffed around my hand a bit, he didn’t climb onto it, so I wasn’t really able to snag him.

Finally, I had a brainstorm. We just got Happy a new, larger cage the other day, and the old one (also glass) hasn’t been put away yet, so I had Sarah go get that while I kept an eye on Happy.

She brought it to me, still empty, and I set it down on its side on the floor, then placed inside it Happy’s food dish with a little food in it. Then we waited.

It only took a minute or so for Happy to notice it, sniff around a bit, then crawl inside. A quick tipping up, and Happy was recaptured and transferred back into his new cage.

Watching Happy explore the world while dodging my attempts to grab him was actually sort of fun. But in reflection, it also makes me think about how tricky it can be to document moving targets like the open Web. Stuff changes, and it changes fast — sometimes so fast you can’t keep up. Seems like every time you reach out to start writing about something, it either changes or gets made obsolete by something newer, better, or faster.

But, just like trying to catch a runaway rodent, documenting the open web is a lot of fun, in a strange, giddy sort of way.

The last month and a half have been filled with productivity killers, from illness to hardware problems. The hits keep on coming.

For the last few days, my iMac, which I use when I’m writing because I have so much screen space on it (three screens, courtesy of the integrated screen, the video port, and a USB->DVI converter box), has been acting oddly.

Yesterday I ran some tests on it, and lo and behold, TechTool Pro tells me the video subsystem is bad. Apple’s hardware test utility says the disk controller is bad. I have no idea what exactly the problem is, but clearly all is not well in iMac-land.

So I have an appointment to take it in for service tomorrow evening. In the meantime, I’m working on the MacBook Pro.  Which is a great machine, except I don’t have a really good place to work on my laptop for extended periods. My desk is far too crowded to put a laptop on, so I’m working in the living room. Which is not the optimal place to work for many reasons, both ergonomic and Sophie-nomic.

The point to this pathetic little rant: if you’re expecting or hoping for something from me, I’m running a bit behind at the moment, so please be patient! Sorry!

The bug I had while I was in California utterly failing to attend the meetings I’d flown out for turned into bronchitis, which grew ambitious and advanced to pneumonia. So my productivity has utterly tanked the last couple of weeks. I’m trying to get as much work done as I can, but I need to rest so as to let myself recover. My availability will likely continue to be spotty for at least a few more days. I can tell things are finally starting to improve, but I have a few days’ worth of antibiotics left, and am being encouraged by several people (including my doctor) to take it easy, so I think I will do so.

My apologies to anyone waiting for stuff from me; I have a ton of “hey, could you look at this” emails that I just haven’t had the energy to deal with yet. I’m slowly making my way through them.

Just in case anyone hasn’t noticed, I’ve been MIA for the most part for several days, taken out by a sudden and unpleasant flu. I’m gradually improving now, and hope to be back to work, at least a little bit, on Friday. If you’ve been watching your inbox for email from me (I have a ton of messages I’m just not up to dealing with), that’s why.

Lately I’ve been thinking more about my place in the developer relations team at Mozilla. It’s sort of an odd place for me to be, sometimes. While my work managing the Mozilla Developer Center is obviously a component of developer relations, in past organizations I’ve worked in, technical writing was actually part of the engineering group.

Developer relations

Sometimes while I’m sitting in meetings, I find myself feeling vaguely adrift, since a lot of what goes on doesn’t all that directly relate to what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. While my work involves interacting with developers, it’s generally on a different level than most of the rest of developer relations. I’m more interested in getting down information than in what exactly people choose to do with it.

To be honest, the sort of public relations work that a lot of developer relations involves — while incredibly important — isn’t really my forte.  I’m glad we have a bunch of folks that are both good at it and enjoy it, because that’s certainly not me!

Engineering

On the other hand, attending engineering meetings can be an interesting experience for me. As a writer, I’m in the complicated position of needing to know what’s coming while avoiding knowing too much about things that are in a state of flux.

For example, let’s say a new technology is being introduced in the next version of Gecko. Great! I’ll need to write about that, of course.

The problem is this: when do I start studying up on it? If I start learning the technology too soon, I risk learning details that may change over time, requiring re-learning stuff later when the specifics change.

This happens fairly often. For that reason, I try to wait until a technology appears to be entering a relatively steady state before starting to learn details about it, let alone write about it. There’s probably nothing as frustrating as writing documentation about something only to have to redo it all because of drastic changes to an API.

However, I have to balance that with the need to have the documentation ready by the product’s ship date, and preferably by around the time it enters beta, so that developers have the material in hand when they need it.

It’s a tricky fine line to walk, but I like to think I’ve mostly done a good job of this. Our documentation for the releases of Firefox (and by extension, Gecko) that we’ve shipped since I joined Mozilla four years ago has generally been pretty good. Especially given the enormous amount of material there is to cover!

Between worlds

So basically, I sometimes feel sort of adrift between engineering and developer relations. Maybe that’s the right place to be. I don’t know. I suppose it helps to ensure I’m in touch with everyone I need to be dealing with.

But occasionally it can be slightly frustrating, too.

I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done about that. Writing developer documentation is a strange world to live in. It’s exciting and rewarding work, though, and I feel like I found my calling when I took my first technical writing job, which, ironically, I took because it was the only job I came close to qualifying for at a company I badly wanted to work for, and not because I was specifically looking to be a writer.

Here are three photos of things I saw today that amused me.

This one, I’ve seen actually many times over the last few years — the sign at my dentist’s office:

I find it amusing that my dentist’s office is on Crest Road.

Then there’s this one:

Typos on signs amuse me.

Then there’s this bumper sticker, which unfortunately is hard to read in this picture, courtesy of being taken from too car away with a cell phone camera:

“Things get better with age… I’m approaching magnificent!”

Panic Software is having a three-day 50% off sale on their Mac titles, including the fantastically awesome Coda web development software. If you’ve been stalling on buying a copy because of the $99 price tag, now’s the time to jump in!  I love this thing, so I figured I’d spread the word.