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tekom report
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
I hope that the cognitive impairment resulting from jet lag has dissipated enough to write this post.Last week, I attended tekom/tcworld. With approximately 2200 attendees, plus 1200 trade show-only visitors, this is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the world. Over 180 vendors were at the trade show, along with some fairly impressive accessories.
I am sorry to tell you that the chocolate fountain people showed up with a juice bar this year.
Wednesday morning started off on a fun note, as several people stopped by to congratulate us on the election. The European population is at least as interested in this year's U.S. election as we were. (Side note: During an extended beer-and-sausage dinner at the Ratskeller, a group of us were sitting behind a group of German bikers. They were in full biker regalia, with patches for something like "Rolling Thunder Wiesbaden." Lots of beards, beards with braids, long hair, and leather. In fact, other than the German language, they would have fit right in at Myrtle Beach during Bike Week. So, at one point, their table got loud(er), and we looked over to see them crashing their beer mugs together yelling, "OBAMA! OBAMA!")
We had an opportunity to catch up with conference buddies and fellow consultants. Tony Self's description of Australia's fierce killer magpies was especially entertaining. I'm afraid I didn't quite believe the story at first, but wikipedia says it's true. (Bike helmets with fake eyes on the back to fool the magpies into attacking the back of your head instead of pecking out your real eyes!)On a work-related note, I delivered two sessions, one on XSL and one on Web 2.0. If you're interested in a (very) basic introduction to XSL, the content of the XSL workshop is now available. You'll need the instructions (PDF, 1.1MB), the XML sample file, and the CSS file for formatting. The workshop is based on information from our three-day XSL class, which is obviously far more detailed.
The Web 2.0 presentation, in Flash format, is available below:
Notes: Use the arrow keys to navigate through the slides. The first slide may take a few seconds to come up; the presentation file is quite large. If you prefer a narrative white paper version, we have one here.
A few final thoughts about the conference:
- Internet connectivity ranged from prohibitively costly to insanely expensive. I got three calls from AT&T while in Germany to tell me that I had exceeded my data plan allowance and needed to upgrade to prevent the ominous "overage fees." I appreciate the customer service, but I'd appreciate an inexpensive international data plan more. Perhaps related to this, there was little blogging and less twittering coming out of this conference. People seemed less connected to their cell phones and laptops. This might be a good thing.
- My favorite example of internationalized documentation is here (not for the very easily offended). I took this picture in Bingen, a lovely town on the Rhine about half an hour from Wiesbaden. If you're interested in other pictures, you can see mine here (they were taken on a cell phone camera, so apologies in advance for the quality issues).
Labels: conferences, tekom, travel, xsl
12:47 PM Permalink | |
Coming attractions
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
DocTrain East kicks off next Wednesday, October 29. Scriptorium will be well-represented; Simon Bate is delivering a day-long workshop, Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL and DITA. If you have signed up for this workshop, expect details on the software you need in the next 24 hours or so. If you don't hear from Simon, please contact DocTrain to make sure that you are registered for the event.
Thursday morning (October 30), Simon will deliver a session comparing DITA support in XMetaL and FrameMaker. Meanwhile, Matt Arnold will be camped out in the trade show area. We're bringing tons of goodies, including the usual chocolate, so be sure to stop by and say hello. We're also doing several giveaways. (Yes, we will bribe you to visit us. Those trade shows can get really tedious...)
The following week, Matt and I will be attending tekom/tcworld in Wiesbaden, Germany. At this conference, I'll be doing a workshop on XSL and a presentation on Web 2.0 and technical communication. Both are on Thursday. Instead of bringing coals to Newcastle (and taking up precious space in our limited baggage), we'll be picking up chocolate for our booth at a local (and excellent) shop. I visited Kunder last year and, as usual, spent way too much. (Fair warning, they don't take U.S. credit cards, so bring euros. Lots of euros.)
Again, please stop by the booth and visit if you're at the conference.
tekom ends on Friday (November 7), but we're staying until Sunday morning to take advantage of cheaper airfare. Saturday, I'm planning a field trip to Bingen am Rhein, which has connections to the medieval Hildegard von Bingen. We can reach Bingen by train in about an hour. If you're interested in going, leave me a comment or send email and I'll attempt to coordinate.
Labels: conferences, doctraineast08, tekom, travel
12:21 PM Permalink | |
Vade mecum tekom
Friday, September 12, 2008 — posted by Ethan Duty
This year's tcworld conference and tekom-Trade Fair is November 5–7 at its usual location in Wiesbaden, Germany. Sarah O'Keefe has two presentations scheduled*, and Matt Arnold will be camped out at the Scriptorium trade show booth as usual.If you have never attended tekom/tcworld, we highly recommend it. The conference is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the world. (Yes, it's bigger than STC.) Wiesbaden is a lovely town and was an R&R facility for soldiers (Roman soldiers) who came to soak in the hot springs. In addition to the historical interest, tekom and Scriptorium have a special offer for first-time attendees from non–German-speaking country. Use this registration form and get 20% off your registration.
* The sessions are both on Thursday: Introduction to XSL workshop (11:15 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and The Implications of Web 2.0 for Technical Communicators (3 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.)
Labels: conferences, tekom, travel
10:48 AM Permalink | |
Coming attractions
Saturday, May 10, 2008 — posted by Sarah
I greatly enjoyed my time in Vancouver for DocTrain West.Unfortunately, the process of getting to and from Vancouver is shaping up to be one of the "typical" travel nightmares. Outbound, I missed a connection (because of weather) by a few minutes, which resulted in a six-hour penalty in travel time.
Inbound back to RDU, I'm writing this on the Vancouver to Dallas plane, which is currently parked at the gate in Vancouver and shows no signs of departing anytime soon. Now, I'd prefer that they fix the hydraulic leak before we go, but it seems as though lately, the on-time rates have gone south. (Hmmm. I live in the South and it occurs to me that this metaphor is a bit locale-ist.) let's try again...the on-time rates have gone down the toilet. (oops. That's sure to offend someone and also lead to Google search hits I'd prefer not to have.) ....the on-time rates really s*** (this is getting worse instead of better). ...the airlines appear to be having some challenges (cough, cough) with their already lousy on-time operations. [Update: We departed almost three hours late with a new, non-leaking hydraulic component.] [Update2: I'm posting this from DFW.]
Anyway, I assume I'll get back at some point. Meanwhile, the conference itself was fun. Got to catch up with lots of people, saw some interesting presentations, and did two sessions that seemed to go reasonably well.
This is only the second time I've done a hands-on workshop in a conference context. Attempting to do one of these sessions is right behind high places, spiders, and eggplant on my list of phobias.
Why? I have little or no control over installation and configuration issues. For an XSL workshop, the minimum requirements are a Java runtime and an XSL parser (both free and open source and therefore a bit challenging to install). A text editor intended for programming (such as Oxygen) would be nice, too. It's impossible to get everyone configured ahead of time, so we end up scrambling to make everything work at the beginning of class. And then we have essentially infinite possible problems ranging from problems with wireless connections to platform variations to security problems (as in, you can't install anything because IT has locked your machine down).
This time around, things actually went extremely well. We had the usual issues, but everything got resolved (which isn't always the case). Although I had rather a large group for a hands-on session, we stayed on track with the schedule and even crammed in some extra material. (Private note to participants: Sorry about the exploding brain problem.) My favorite "problem" in this workshop was in attempting to help one participant. I started typing something and got unexpected input, which was because my touch-typing doesn't work on a non-U.S. keyboard. My attempts to locate the <, >, :, and = keystrokes were truly pathetic. The keyboard owner was nice enough not to laugh at me as she pointed to the correct keys.
Anyway, I'll be attempting this particular trick again at the upcoming Trends in Technical Communication (STC UK) event in Birmingham, so if you're interested in a fun-filled day of declarative programming, you should join us!
After Birmingham, I'll be attending X-Pubs in London. At that conference, I'm presenting the live version of our Web 2.0 white paper. We are attempting to provide some insight into how technical communication and user-generated content will intersect.
If you'll be at either of these events, please let me know.
And finally, after a nudge from a coworker, I have set up a Twitter account. You can find me at okeefe_scr. I'm not sure where that experiment will go, but I thought I'd give it a try.
Labels: conferences, doctrainwest08, travel, web 2.0
6:20 PM Permalink | |
Well, at least I don't have DVT. Yet.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008 — posted by Sarah
Today's trip to Vancouver for DocTrain West started harmlessly enough. An 8 a.m. flight out of Raleigh/Durham (RDU) left pretty much on time. Matt and I were on-board; Sheila is booked on a later flight.But then, a thunderstorm hit DFW (at 10 in the morning??) and so our plane circled Waco for about an hour.
When we landed at DFW, it was 10:58 a.m. The outbound flight to Vancouver was scheduled to leave at 10:55 a.m. I figured the storms probably delayed the outbound flight, too. They did...until 11:05 a.m. And you know what, you can't make it from gate C35 to gate D20 in 7 minutes.
So I called the nice people at American. They offered me the next nonstop flight, six hours later. Ugh. Oh, and my lovely preselected, UPGRADED seat on the previous flight? No? How about maybe an exit row? Nope, not that either. So, sit around in DFW for six hours and then another four hours in a lousy seat? Ick.
Off we go to visit the nice people at the Admirals Club and see if they can help. They took my (original) boarding pass, did some typing, and then looked puzzled. "Hmmm. The system doesn't think you're in this seat." That would be because the plane left without me. See, I'm standing right here and the plane is up in the sky with my seat.
Lots more tapping. Eventually, we rebooked onto a flight to San Francisco (SFO) with a connection onto Alaska Airlines up to Vancouver. The agent assured us that checked bags would be pulled and would get onto these flights. We wanted to believe her.
DFW to SFO was uneventful. Got some decent seats, but sadly no upgrades.
Arrived in SFO, changed terminals, had to re-clear security (booo, pet peeve). Wandered down to Alaska Airlines.
And then a miracle occurred. They announced that four first-class seats were available for a nominal fee, first-come, first-served, and we were standing less than 10 feet from the podium. Wooo!
I was quite impressed with the operations at Alaska Airlines. Cheerful, happy, and competent.
So finally, we arrive in Vancouver, where the sun was shining (!), six hours later than scheduled.
Last stop, baggage claim. Watch the carousel turn. Look for baggage. Don't see it.
Meanwhile, the DFW-YVR flight arrived at about the same time. On a whim, we checked it, and sure enough, there were Matt's bags.
Things could be worse. For starters, I don't have DVT. Yet.
Oh, and I'll probably get extra miles from my cross-country jaunt.
And Sheila? Last I heard, she had been rerouted from RDU-DFW-YVR to RDU-STL-SEA-YVR with arrival moved from 7 p.m. to "around midnight."
Labels: travel
1:26 AM Permalink | |