So we went to a Halloween party this past Saturday night. We were misled into thinking that the host rented a hall, instead of merely frequenting it, with its in-wall taps of Bud and Coors Light and walking proximity to the host’s home. So, our evening was shared with The Older Folks Who Frequent These Types of Organizations. However, some good friends were there, some who had moved back into the area, and even though it’s Bud, it still gives you a buzz.

There was another couple our age there, the Wife with whom I went to high school. However, she being the Cheerleader and me being in the Band, our paths never crossed, and I didn’t even know she went to my high school reunion just two weeks ago.

In her attempt at small talk, she opened with “So how are you, Ed?” and then went into a huge diatribe about Her Kids. Her 10 and 11 year old kids, the older of whom is a Nerd because he gets straight A’s and then they go and do this and this and this and isn’t that funny, Ed? And of course, Husband is right there chiming in with his version of the stories, and recalling different details than Wife is. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Great fucking times. Chalk another up in my list of reasons I’m not having kids.

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A friend contacted me on Facebook to ask if I knew any web site designers for her sister’s newly-opened store. I replied with this, which is probably way more than she asked for. Then I realized I could repurpose the content. I think they’re good tips for anyone looking to find someone to create and maintain their web site.

• Depending on your business, there could be niche designers. I know there are designers who work solely with race car drivers and teams, or restaurants, so that may be something to look into.
• Before you talk or meet with anyone, find some of your competition’s sites, see what features they have, list what you like and dislike. Do the same thing with sites you visit regularly. Ask yourself if you are one of those people who hated Facebook’s re-redesign. Why? Why not?
• Don’t walk into any conversation with “I’m not really tech-y, but…”. You’re already giving them the upper hand.
• “Web 2.0″ doesn’t mean all that much.
• Make sure they respond to emails within a reasonable amount of time, especially if it’s the only way you communicate.
• Don’t trust anyone who tells you they can get your site in the top 10 on google. Don’t listen to anyone who is a search engine optimization (SEO) expert. SEO simply doesn’t work, and in some cases will get you worse results than if you haven’t done anything.
• Make sure you see an online portfolio, and that you like what you see.
• Navigation and search are extraordinarily important; make sure they work on the sites in their portfolio you visit, and are logical.
• Don’t use the lowest bidder, but don’t necessarily use the highest either. Pay for experience.
• In this economy, tons of designers are looking for work. Make sure you like them and are someone with whom you can see yourself having a long working relationship.
• Give them as much clean, grammatically correct text as you can. Remember, designers generally aren’t writers or editors. They take what they’re given and put it on the page.
• Make sure you give value back to the customer. Maybe start a blog about your sister’s area of expertise, and make sure it’s updated regularly.
• Keep the site fresh, too; just like with a designer, you want to start a long relationship with the people who visit your site. You can’t make it look like no one’s minding the virtual store, or no one will come back to check after awhile.
• Listen to people who talk about content management, content management systems, or CMS. If they use words like Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress (all great CMS), make sure they explain it to you. Ask questions.
• And remember – it’s not just a page anymore. You can’t just slip some nice graphics on a page and a little bit of vague sales-y text. We call that ‘brochureware’. It’s a site.

In 1998, I was diagnosed with late-stage Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a form of cancer. The original course of treatment was supposed to be chemotherapy, followed by radiation; both are standard cancer treatments. However, it was determined by doctors after the chemo that the tumor on my lung didn’t shrink enough for radiation to be effective.

Great.

Thankfully, my oncologist sent me to Hackensack University Medical Center to see if I could take part in a relatively new form of treatment for 1999: the stem cell transplant. The doctors there concluded that an autologous stem cell transplant was my best bet for survival (this while I’m only 28 years old), so plans went forward. Of course, as an experimental treatment, it had to be approved by my employer-provided health insurance.

The process for the stem cell transplant required me to be hospitalized for several days while I was given high-dose chemotherapy. “Day Zero” was the day on which the stem cells are re-introduced, and then they keep you until your blood counts rise to a certain level, because the chemo essentially wipes out your immune system. (Please do not consider this a complete view of the process, since it’s been 10 years since I had it.)

On Day Zero, you literally have no immune system (post-transplant, i had to get all of my baby immunizations again… hmm, wonder if one of those vaccines gave me mental retardation… ). Since hospitals are germ-laden, the hospital typically moves patients after Day Zero to a floor in a nearby hotel kept specifically for these kind of procedures.

My insurance provider at the time, Guardian, thankfully approved the overall procedure. However, they refused to allow me to be transferred to the hotel after Day Zero. They refused, depsite the fact that putting me up in the hotel was cheaper, and better for me personally, as the risk of infection in the hospital was pretty high.

Thankfully, 10 years later I’m still here, but it goes to show that the insurance companies aren’t terribly efficient, and don’t necessarily put the patient’s health above all else.

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I’m leaving work last Thursday, walking towards the New York Stock Exchange, home to unbridled optimism and beaming stock brokers, fat on profits taxpayers’ bailout money. What do I see? A bee. But not just any bee. Samantha Bee, senior correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where liberals go for all of their unbiased, comedy-ridden news. And she’s dressed as a bumble bee, with $100 bills for wings.

And that’s why, despite the weight of a DSLR, I always carry my camera with me.

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If you’re fortunate enough not to use Word, it seems the only other decent choice for technical writing is Adobe’s Framemaker. However, some of Frame’s quirks make Word look almost welcoming. Here’s a running list of the things I’d like to see in the next release of Frame, in no particular order:

• Find and Replace with more functions. How come I can find a marker, but can’t replace it with a different kind of marker?
• Dialog boxes and palettes that you can close with the Esc key.
• More intuitive keyboard shortcuts. All of these Esc functions hearken back to UNIX, and when’s the last time anyone used Frame on UNIX?
• Drag and drop text. C’mon, this was a new feature to users back in, what, 1990?
• I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Macintosh support. Seriously, I’d give the Mac another look if Frame ran on it natively. Emulation doesn’t count. Yes, I’m aware of Boot Camp and Parallels.
• Full OpenType support. All of Adobe’s fonts are now OpenType, with ligatures and special characters, but yet we tech writers get the typographical shaft.
• Word processing features, like AutoCorrect, spellcheck as you type, and all of those everyday functions that Word has, but writing in Word is so bad that you refuse to go back.
• How about Ctrl-backspace to delete a word before the cursor, just as Ctrl-delete works great for deleting the word before a cursor. Again, this was a feature of, let’s say, Word 2.0?
• Support for transparent PNGs.
• How about a more usable “missing file” dialog box? If you type in the path to the file, Frame doesn’t change to that directory, it accepts that as the filename!
• Much better style management. How come I can import styles across a book, but they don’t always update? Why can’t I delete unused styles? Argh.
• A reasonable upgrade price commensurate with the new features. All DITA, all the time, isn’t worth $400.

Check back often for updates to this list, since I find something that drives me insane pretty regularly.

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