blog @ spacebarpress

Time Flies When You’re Learning

Julia — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:31:51 +0000

So it’s been a month since I started my grammar class, and I’m impressed at how fast time has gone. We’re already at Week 4, and even had our first test! As usual I’m nervous about how I did on the test, mainly because we had to give reasons for our choices of words or punctuation, which is a tough thing to do. It’s tough because often we don’t know the reasons why, although by taking this class I’m slowly learning the reasons, but it’s also tough because I don’t know how the teacher wants to hear the reasons. That is, how should I be phrasing the reason so that he understands and knows it’s the correct one? I’ll find out next week how I did, and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

Back to School, Back to School

Julia — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:11:46 +0000

Yes folks, it’s about that time, time for me to get back to school. Woot! If I haven’t mentioned it before (and I suspect I haven’t since I haven’t blogged here in a while), I’m starting to take some official editing classes at a local college. First up is a grammar class. That’s going to be fun, yes, you read that right F-U-N. I am a grammar geek, so I’m looking forward to it. Since it’s been almost 10 years since I took a grammar class for my technical writing certificate, this should be good. I’m looking forward to discussing temporal clauses, or subordinate objects and all that other fun stuff. The class lasts 13 or 14 weeks, so I’ll be busy with it until the beginning of July. The best part of all is that I was able to get my current employer to pay for the class since we each get a training budget every year and most of us don’t use it. These classes aren’t very expensive, so it was no problem getting them to pay for it. Double woot! Although I would have paid for them myself since it would have been tax deductible next year, but since they were willing to pay, who am I to refuse?

Coming Face-to-Face With My Audience

Julia — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:39:03 +0000

Last night I was visiting a friend who’s husband also works for my employer. After dinner I noticed that he was getting ready to go out and he said it’s because he had to supervise the release of a new version of software that the company was doing. I asked him about it and was surprised when he told me the name, because it turns out that it was something that my team had written about! I didn’t think that his team would also use our documents as typically only the infrastructure support team did (they’re our main audience), but he said that his team uses the documents to confirm the work they’re doing. Just like I use design documents and functional specifications to work on my documents, HE adds the operational documentation I create/maintain to that list and uses them all when he’s working on an implementation.

I wouldn’t have thought that our documents would be used that way, at least not at this company, but it is. And that’s pretty cool.

Taming the SharePoint Beast

Julia — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:28:02 +0000

This week I spent a good part of my time at the office trying to tame SharePoint. I’m the vice-SharePoint guru in my department, and I’ve been a little remiss in my sandbox play. In fact, I’d completely forgotten I even had access to our UAT SharePoint environment! We currently use a SharePoint site to handle document approvals, and a few of my colleagues had been complaining about some of the features and things on the site, so I thought I’d take a spin through it again to see if there was anything I could change.

BUT, it had been so long that it took me a couple of hours to get back into the swing of things. And then I was off! I was tweaking lists and updating fields and hiding columns and filtering data for the rest of the week. Woo ha.

Taking an Official Break

Julia — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:34:15 +0000

One of the reasons I haven’t blogged here in a while is that I was on vacation for two weeks at the end of February. I was in Vancouver watching the Winter Olympics! It was a spectacular time to be in Vancouver, even more so than normal. People were feeling very patriotic and were wooing and cheering all the time. Impromptu O Canada’s were sung at amusing times, like during curling matches or waiting in line at security to get into an event. We Canadians are a patriotic bunch, just as patriotic as Americans, however we’re not normally as vocal about it as they are. We just put on a Canada flag pin or sew a flag on our backpacks as we wander the world, we don’t normally wear a Canada tshirt under a Canada hoodie with a Canada scarf around our necks and Canada mittens while cheering “Go Canada Go!” But we did, and we liked it. We really liked it!
Now that I’m all rested up and my voice has recovered from the two weeks of cheering, I’m going to buckle down and get back to the freelancing attempts. Yes, famous last words, but I’m really going to try harder. As I mentioned before, I signed up for the first course in an Editing certificate, and I’m going to start devoting more time to getting things off the ground. Honest.