Poet Ponders the Digital

As some of you know, I decided against renewing my contract with the university where I work. Basically, the choice I faced was either stay in a place where I did not belong or not renew my contract so I could look for work elsewhere. Schools need to interview in the spring so they can hire new faculty and update course catalogs. It is a gamble to change jobs, but one my wife and I agreed would be best for me. Because my doctorate research focused on higher education and technology, I consider myself qualified to state that we are in the early stages of a major revolution. The upheaval is painful as some colleges rush online, while others outsource their online courses. Some top-tier universities and many community colleges are making these transitions well, but the vast majority of institutions are going to experience unrest. As a colleague told me, research like mine might encourage universities to trade classrooms for websites. The clock is ticking down as June approaches. In a ...

Today I was talking to a partner at a regional marketing firm that specializes in STEM clients (medical devices, computer hardware, etc). He said the biggest challenge wasn't finding tech writers — it was finding technically skilled writers. Some new graduates want to be "tech writers" and have solid writing skills, yet they don't know the software, file formats, mark-up languages, and other tools of the trade. We end up training people on simple tasks: using styles in applications, planning DITA content, etc. Many employers, however, don't want to train new graduates; they assume new graduates have the toolset skills required to start working on day one. Should "tech writing" programs include more applied skills that go beyond composing and editing to include designing, formatting, and distributing materials? My own academic experience did not include any coursework with hands-on computer time, but I have the advantage of being a computer programme...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 4, 2013 Deadline March 2013 Issue Infection Prevention: Phishing, Trojans, Viruses and Malware Shock. Horror. Anger. Informing a small business owner that her computer had 4912 infected files, four rootkit viruses and a phishing redirect affecting her Web browser, I witnessed a range of emotions that understandably concluded with anger. A simple mistake led to a panicked early morning phone call to me. “I clicked on a link I thought was to a YouTube video. The message was from a friend, I thought,” my client explained. “And now, I can’t get anything done. Am I going to lose all my data?” Her situation demonstrates a chain of events that is all too common. Tracing the events will help others avoid this same experience. The series of events began when a friend of my client accidentally give away her e-mail password to an evil “phishing” bot. This was not a skilled hacking effort, but a simple ruse. Phishing requires bait. Criminals ...

We learned a lesson tonight when I was trying to submit a script to a production company: PDFs from DOC files are much, much smaller than PDFs generated from DOCX files. Microsoft Word migrated from the familiar ".DOC" format of Word 97-2004 with the release of Word 2007/2008 (Windows/OS X). I recall the painful transition from Word 95 to Word 97, but nothing has compared to the nightmare that is the DOCX "Office XML" file format. I appreciate the idea of XML-based documents. Unfortunately, Microsoft's DOCX seems to cause a fair amount of pain. The 101-page script stored as a DOCX refused to convert to a compressed and optimized PDF with Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat Pro, or Apple's built-in PDF driver. This left me able to create only an uncompressed PDF. The file was 62 megabytes! A 184 kilobyte document exploded to 62MB… and it couldn't be emailed through our server. Saving the document as a DOC file, the document grew to 214KB, a bit larger than...