Scriniary

Today I redesigned the afghan I’m crocheting to account for the impending shortage of yarn. I decided to try adding to more colors to it: it’s off-white and navy and dark green, so some lighter shades of blue and green should work.

Went to two stores (the third was closed) and they didn’t have a large selection. I may try the third store tomorrow, or go to a real yarn store (although the real yarn store does not sell the brand I want, according to their website). I don’t want to buy online because I need to compare the colors. I have plenty of time to find yarn, since I still have 48 green and white squares to make.

Had more success at Lowe’s: we now have tomato, hot pepper, and basil plants, along with some lettuce, parsley, mint, and morning glory seeds. But I have to go back and get more dirt.

Meant to go to the park today for more flower photos, but everything took forever.

Links:

• Dvorak driver for the Palm Universal Wireless Keyboard! — Hacked together by some random guy. The []{} aren’t there (instead there are two sets of -_=+), but I can live with that. This makes me very happy, as I like to take my Palm to the bookstore to write, and I can’t type in qwerty very well anymore.
• A review of the three tutorials I used to learn Dvorak — I don’t think I linked to that before. I need to go back and practice some more to increase my speed.
• Read It and Lacrimate — Tired of reading jargon-filled press releases, Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post decided to ask the PR folks some similarly worded questions to see if they understood them:
  

  Me: Vis-a-vis the implementation of SAP technology, what is the source-related derivation of the acronymically based identifier of the service entity, and how does it operate so as to enhance production and profitability or, alternatively, improve the business model of the shelf-stable protein supplier of which Clarkston is now a client?

  He was surprised at the results.

Goals for the coming week:
Critting — I need to get back to a novel, and poke at the OWW.

Came up with a new short story during my walk on Friday, and would like to get that drafted this week.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 5:59 pm under dvorak, weekly_progress_reports
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Only a month late, here are the photos I took on a wildflower hike in Highbanks Metropark in late April.

The fun part about posting these so long after I took them was re-identifying all the plants, although I remembered them all except for the toothwort.

	Dutchman’s breeches So-named because they look like a pair of trousers.
	Trout lily – yellow It was tricky to get the camera close to the plant while not casting a shadow or stepping on other plants…

The rest of the photos (10 total) are in the Highbanks Apr 22 2007 gallery.

I’ve applied (it’s a much more involved process here than in Toledo) to monitor rare plants in the park system again, and I’m looking forward to that. This time I can take photos. With luck (and practice) I’ll get better at them.

Filed by scriniary at 11:50 pm under Outdoors
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Spent much of last week in Minneapolis at the Society for Technical Communication’s 54th Annual Conference.

The most entertaining session I attended was Jennifer Jobst’s talk on screen readers. I’ve read about accessibility but never heard a screen reader in action. We (the audience) had to try to navigate Slashdot’s site, and it was not easy — the content of the site comes after all the links in both sidebars. I want to download the trial version of JAWS and try it out on my sites.

The most useful sessions for me were Manuel Gordon’s talk on white papers and the session on Unified Modeling Language by Mark Hanigan and Cindy Skawinski.

Note to self: Download session handouts for stuff you missed here.

Tom Johnson interviewed many attendees and speakers for his podcast, Tech Writer Voices.

We also hung out with my boyfriend’s brother and his fiancee, and went to the Science Museum, which has an interesting exhibit on the Mississippi River.

Complaint of the Week:
NBC cut away from yesterday’s hockey game after it went to sudden death overtime in favor of the Preakness *an hour before the race started*.

Goals for the coming week:
One project needs to get wrapped up this week, and then I can get back to work on my own book after ignoring it for far too long. May has been a surprisingly busy month, not that June will be significantly slower.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 2:48 pm under techwriting, weekly_progress_reports
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Links:

• Let’s Try It One More Time: A Tale of Three Best-Sellers — some examples of bestselling novels that underwent extensive revision:
  

  What impresses — and consoles me — about these over-the-top tales of revision behind successful writing is the commitment of these writers to push themselves and their willingness to jettison reams of copy in search of an acceptable version.

• Zanzjan on sequels:
  

  The first tricksy thing is finding a balance of clueing in some of the past without making the book FEEL like a sequel….So, for those of you who write stuff that are discrete stories set in a single universe, how do you maintain that balance, or do you assiduously avoid letting works cross-pollinate? As a reader, what strategies of this sort makes you crazy?

  Good comments in the, uh, comments.

I am too lazy to make WordPress do proper LiveJournal links.

Goals for the past week:
* Some more typing, but critting two novels takes priority this week, and there are two essay type things that I want to write.

Half done with one book, so that’s what I’ll be doing this week again.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 11:55 am under weekly_progress_reports
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