Snow, Woodstove, and a Re-Write

Well, Andy has left but Dana and I went to Ikea and bought ten more Andy’s. Yesterday I finished my project for the day early — rewriting the dialog box text for the Windows installer and import wizards — so I assembled four Andy’s. Now all Flockers in the garage have little rolling carts with drawers where they can store their essentials.

And now I’m in Tahoe. Conditions are ideal — we missed the traffic last night, drove up on clear roads, but overnight it began snowing. Powder this morning. My laptop found an Internet connection without having to leave the cabin. Apparently our neighbors up here have a wireless home network. I’ll ‘fess up when I see them and offer payment. Honest!

Today I will download the latest build and begin updating the documents in the wiki, particularly the user’s guide. I’ve got a fire going in the woodstove and the snow is falling. What a great setting for doing a re-write!

Blog About It

“Blog about it.” I’ve heard this a dozen or so times from Chris Messina; he tells me this whenever I complain that it’s difficult to learn how to manage a wiki, or cope with bad user documentation.

So when I started having trouble with a complicated knitting pattern — knitting patterns are notorious examples of very bad technical writing — I decided to see if anyone had blogged about it.

Sure enough, there are lots of blogging knitters (or knitting bloggers). Three of them had blogged about my troublesome pattern. And of the three, one had gotten nearly one-third of the way through the project, and her toddler had grabbed the edge of her knitting and used it to pull himself up, resulting in fifteen rows being unravelled.

As it happened, fifteen rows was about the amount I had to un-knit in order to get back to the point where the pattern had stopped making sense. Feeling less alone, I un-knitted the complicated rows of yarn-overs and knit-2-togs, and began again. The project is coming together nicely now.

So, maybe I’ll check around and see if anyone has blogged about trying to learn how to garden a wiki.

technorati tags: knitting, wiki gardening