Editing

Three felons over for dinner.
Emeryville, California - January 2005

As a technical writer, I sometimes have to edit things other people have written, decipher them, turn them into something resembling English, and squeeze them into an existing document. Lots of times this stuff fits in as well as the square piece into an tightly packed tetris board. Usually, people leave me alone with the things I've written, and aside from the occassional change suggested by the company's PC police that make me change "whitelist" and "blacklist," or remove all mention of the word abort, or even avoid any variation of death, people trust me that what I've said is, at least, grammatical. Yesterday, I got a comment from a software developer here, saying, "Page 22 of the guide says '...and is used to change its network settings' is wrong. There is an apostrophe missing in 'it's.'" Yeah, a software developer "correcting" my punctuation. I know this is sort of a common problem, no one knows how to use apostrophes anymore, but still. Come on, this is an easy one.

I know the way things usually go around here, with a heavy lean on boosting the developers' precious and fragile egos. I once suggested to people that the word textize isn't a word and that it should be changed in the software. Guess who lost. Still, I stood my ground on this one, and explained how I had no intention of changing "its." So far, so good. No one has told me otherwise, but I'm sure that hammer'll fall on Monday.

This morning, I got an email from the same developer telling me to add something he wrote to the document, which he felt was great, and ready to go as is, "Scott, I'll make this easy for you," he said, "I did all the work." I wrote back immediately, without even reading what he wrote, thanking him for helping out. Libertade.

His addition? Ready? Hold onto your chair: "Events equal to or worse to the logging priority logging value of logging priorities will be logged using the logging feature of this product. For more information on the logging features of this and this product, please see this section."

Cool, eh? I did not make that up. It's hard to even consider that writing, any effort to assign a language to it aside. I fixed it, and added it to the document. Now, I have to figure out how to explain to him, kindly, gently, when he asks why I changed his art, his masterpiece, his child. I think I'd have probably been better off leaving it alone.

-=-

The shot above is sort of one of a set. The railroad tracks used by Amtrak's Capital Corridor and some shipping lines are barely a block and a half from my office. The Emeryville station, just another few blocks further. There's something about them that has me obsessed with trying to get the great photos of them whenever I have a camera with me. The tracks, the station, the control lights, the foot bridge over it all, all of it.

Macro Zoom

Rafael Landestoy is sleeping.
San Francisco, California - March 2005

Last weekend, I bought a 28-80mm macro zoom lens that can marcoize down to 1:5. That's not particularly good magnification, but it's a bit better than I had already, and it wasn't a particularly expensive lens. If you notice, there's sort of a weird hazy, dreamy thing in the picture that makes it look like i kind of pulled the camera down and to the left while the shutter was open. Lots of the photos have this look to it. They're all off-kilter somehow, foggy, dreamy. I'm not saying I don't like the way they look, but I don't think I want to have a lens that's only able to take pictures with that effect.

Thing is, I don't know a whole lot about macro photography. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong. I've read that macro lenses are kind of hard to focus, and I needed to use pretty slow shutter speeds with this one, so this might be something that could be resolved with a tripod, but I don't know. I don't know if this is a problem with the lens, or with me, or if i should try to return it.

here's some more, down at flickr.com.

Lame

I object kicking the witness.
San Francisco, California - December 2004

It appears the most newsworthy thing that happened 32 years ago today was the Baltimore Bullets falling to the New York Knicks 95-83 in game one of the Eastern Conference Semifinals. What a lame day.

Laundry

Go to get new recycling bins.
San Francisco, California - February 2005

Ahh. How far society has come when I can tell you I'm writing from a laundromat, while writing from a laundromat.