My daughter and I made a comic. Not a graphic novel, or even a whole comic book, just one comic strip. It was the first time either of us have done anything like this at all, and our first time collaborating on a project. LOTS of fun, and I’m pretty happy with the result. Wanna see it?
I can’t believe it’s November already - October flew by. Heck, 2009 is flying by! There’s lots of stuff coming up this month.
Earlier this week (November 3rd), I got to attend the kickoff meeting of the student branch of the IEEE MTT (microwave theory and techniques) society at the University of Arizona. It was a really enthusiastic bunch of students!
November 7th is the 2nd Annual Tucson Comic-con! Already much bigger than last year, I really see good things coming for this event.
November 12th is the 5th Annual World Usability Day! This event is truly multinational, with hundreds of events across 38 countries. Here in Arizona, it will be the first year we’ve pulled off TWO events - 9-12 in Tucson and 6-8 up in Phoenix.
November 13 through 15 is the 36th annual TusCon event put on by the Baja Arizona Science Fiction Association here in Tucson. Sadly, this is the same weekend that they’re hosting the Arizona Podcamp up in Phoenix. Though I read lots and lots of the science fiction, I’ve yet to find guidance on being in two places at once.
Then, on November 20th, there will be the “Purple vs Gold” scrimmage that will help determine who will wrestle on the Sabino High School varsity wrestling team. Lots of friendly competition!
Though I can’t be there, I’m also watching closely for word from Tekom conference in Germany. This is the biggest European tech comm event, drawing people from all over the world.
And, oh, yeah. Thanksgiving, too!
I’m very disappointed that I missed the deadlines to submit proposals to three conferences next year - UPA (Germany), IA Summit (Phoenix) and SIGCHI (Atlanta). I did manage to get something into the STC Summit (Dallas) and South by Southwest (Austin), and have applied to moderate at the Phoenix Comic-con in May. I wish I could go to all of them (and tons of others), but there’s just no way I can swing travel costs and registration fees for everything I want to attend.
So. I’m going to make a concerted effort to start keeping better track of upcoming events and the CFP deadlines. Until I figure out the best way to do this, I’ll just post start posting them here:
CFP deadline November 10, 2009: IEEE Professional Communication Society annual event, the International Professsional Communication Conference (Twente, the Netherlands, July 2010)
CFP deadline January 1, 2010: IEEE Technology Management Council annual conference (Singapore, June 2010)
CFP deadline January 7, 2010: STC Atlanta chapter Currents conference (Atlanta, April 2010)
Know of any others? Post in comments!
I’ve been preaching emergency preparedness for a while now, and have even published a number of papers on things like writing contingency plans and business continuity. I’ve given talks on the importance of readiness at professional conferences and for the local Red Cross. For some reason, though, the topic suddenly seems to be EVERYWHERE!
My friend and co-author John Hedtke has a new book out called “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Preparedness” (co-authored with Maurice Ramirez).
And just this week, I got TWO magazines that have survival as the theme for the October issue! The entire October issue of Popular Mechanics is devoted to “Beyond Survival: How to Live Through Any Disaster”. You can read part of it online, especially the article “Ready for Anything” by Glenn Reynolds. And yeah, that’s the same title I used for the talk on business continuity that I gave at the Montreal IEEE/PCS conference.
Then just yesterday I got the October issue of Reader’s Digest, again devoted to the overall theme of “How to Survive Anything!” It looks like they won’t be updating their website with October content until October, so you’ll have to take my word for it for now (or check it out at your local magazine store).
So while I’m delighted to see more people talking about preparedness, I have to wonder at the timing of it all. And yeah, I’ll be backing up my hard drives this afternoon, and stocking up on staples like bottled water and Famous Amos cookies.
Having gotten the maximum value we could from the Salzburg Tourist passes, we moved on to Munich. They’re only about 70 miles apart, so it was a pretty easy drive on the Autobahn - we got the Fiat Punto up to about 120 mph (for just a few minutes)!
One of the most classic things-to-see in Munich is the Glockenspiel - mechanical dolls that “dance” when the clock in the town hall strikes 11 am, noon, and 5pm. We waited and watched it, but honestly the more exciting thing for us was the large bookstore right across from the town hall. English language novels for everyone! Remember, we’d had that theft almost a week earlier, and were completely out of reading material. Nearby was the first Starbucks we’d seen all week, which made Heidi very happy.
We also stopped in at the Deutsches Museum, the world’s largest museum of science and technology. They’ve got an amazing collection that spans from stone-age paintings through microelectronics exhibits. Fully worth the visit, though we were pretty tired by then and didn’t give it nearly the attention it deserves.
We did, however, experience several of the infamous Munich beergardens. The first was part of the old Botanical gardens - we lucked out with a gorgeous evening, liters of beer, and our first accidental taste of “radler” - half beer, half lemonade. The next night we stopped at the Hofbrauhaus - just as crazy as you might expect, except that instead of Germans or even Europeans, it was almost all Asian and American tourists. You even had to enter the place through the gift shop! To top it all off, this was the one place in all of Munich (all of Germany, all of the countries in Europe that we visited) that upped the drinking age to 18. Guess they’d had problems in the past! We didn’t stay there long, but instead went to a much better place called the Augustiner. Technically it was a beer cellar not a beer garden, but with the long picnic-style tables, big beers, and jovial company, it was a much better fit for us.
I think next time, if there is a next time, we should fly into Munich first and spend more time there. This trip, however, we had to move on. One stop more stop first - just outside of Munich at the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp. The museum is free, and you can get audio for a self-guided tour in a whole bunch of languages (that’s the paddle-like thing in Eric’s hand). They’ve torn down most of the buildings, leaving the whole place with an eerie, empty feeling. The fence and guard towers are still there, and exhibits that describe all the things that happened there. There’s also a documentary they show several times a day in both English and German.
Our final destination for this trip was Switzerland. Because we spent most of the time in the Austrian and Italian Alps, this was much the same for us. First night was just outside of Lucerne - once again, arriving after dark and heading to bed early for a bright-and-shiny start the next morning. We drove through scary-dangerous mountain passes, saw snow on the top of the mountains, and rode the cable cars up, up, up. This time we stopped to play a bit - ride the longest summer toboggan ride…
and to let the kids spend an afternoon on the ropes courses at the top of Mt. Pilatus.
Our final Swiss night was in Hasliberg - a tiny village we found by accident (not because we were lost). Nice, scenic, very Alpine. We stayed in a sort of school vacation hotel that had the toilets and showers down the hall. This worked out ok because we were the only guests in the whole place.
And our final fun activity was a stop at the Swiss open-air museum at Ballenberg. This is one of those recreations of historic villages (like Plimouth Plantation or Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts) where they make bricks and cheese and straw hats just like they did in olden days. The difference here is that Ballenberg is a whole BUNCH of villages representing different time periods and regions. You have to walk for what feels like miles in between them. Guess who was having fun here and who wasn’t?
One last night in an airport hotel (aren’t these all the same??) and we were on the long trip back home. Despite a few troubles here and there, it was a great vacation!
This is the end of part 4 - need more?
Family Vacation Part 1
Family Vacation Part 2
Family Vacation Part 3
Because we’d arrived at Berchtesgaden too late in the evening to get up the mountain to Eagle’s Nest, we went up first thing the following morning. As most people probably know already, the “Eagle’s Nest” (or “Kehlsteinhaus”) was Hitler’s mountain-top getaway. He didn’t actually spend the night there, but would bring visiting dignitaries up just for fancy dinners. To build the place, the Germans had to first build a road, cut tunnels through the mountain, and eventually install a 124-meter (that’s over 400 feet!) tall private elevator that would take guests up to the house itself. You can no longer drive up the road - it’s just too steep and twisty. Even the buses that run tourists up and down the mountain have to be specially made with extra-strong brakes. The buses stop at the bottom of the elevator (which can take up 40 or 50 people at a time). The Eagle’s Nest itself is now pretty much just a cafe/restaurant - most of the artifacts from the 40s are long gone - but the view from the mountain is absolutely spectacular.
Just outside of Berchtesgaden is the famous Salzburgwerk Salt Mine (yes, that’s where Salzburg got its name!) We went on the official tour (and got official photos). Which was good, because it was cold and dark down there, and we didn’t get many good photos of our own. It was pretty cool stuff - the mine has been in continuous operation since 1517. They dig a hole into the salt deposit, spend a year filling it up with water to make a brine, then spend 28 more years getting the brine out and extracting the salt from that hole. They’ve got 28 holes going at a time! For the tour, they put us into matching jumpsuits, drove us deep into the earth, took us on a boat ride across the top of one of the brine-filled holes, and let us go down the wooden slides that the miners once used. We each got a tiny shaker of salt as a souvenir at the end.
From Berchtesgaden we drove to Salzburg where we planned to stay 2 nights in a row (yay!). Unfortunately, there was a Mozart festival in town, and pretty much all the hotels, pensions, garnis, and other accommodations were all booked up. We ended up staying just outside of Salzburg in a village called St. Leonhard. Right on the bus line, it was remote enough to be quiet (um, and available) but close enough to be an easy bus-ride into Salzburg center. We got passes that let us into all the museums and zoos and parks and let us ride the bus all we wanted for 48 hours for one low price. OK, it was kind of expensive (30 Euro or about $42.00 each) but we made sure to get as much value out of it as we could. Turns out, Salzburg has LOTS to see and do!
Salzburg is at the base of a mountain, and the city at the top is called Oberberg. The gondola that takes you to Oberberg turns out to be in St. Leonhard (not downtown Salzburg), right next to our hotel! It was pretty easy for us to head out and up first thing in the morning. They packed the gondola pretty full of what seemed to be unwashed people who smelled like cigarettes. Despite the crowding and the smell, the ride up the mountain LOOKED spectacular, and we really appreciated the fresh mountain air at the top. And of course, the view from the top, and the hiking trails everywhere. The ride back down (mid-morning) was much nicer since we had the gondola almost to ourselves.
We took the bus from the base of the Gondola right into the heart of the city. One thing we’d heard about from family (for years!) is the Spielzeug Museum (Toy Museum). They had some fun exhibits, including toys that some of us remembered from years ago! It was pretty late when we decided to stop for lunch - even though it was an Irish pub, we ended up with pizza and beer yet again.
No trip to Salzburg would be complete without at least one Mozart-themed stop. We ended up at the house where Mozart lived (not where he was born, but where he lived later in life). I hadn’t realized that he had a sister who was considered quite brilliant at the piano herself. She was just overshadowed by his boy-genious attributes and the publicity machine that grew up around him. Hmmm… Here’s a portrait of the family (Amadeus, his sister Maria Anna, his dad Leopold, and the portrait of his dead mother Anna Maria) from 1781. They were so busy with touring and promotion and stuff that they ended up posing separately over the course of a year or so and the artist just made it look like they were all together.
That all seems like a lot for one day, but we weren’t done yet! The castle at Hellbrun was run by a real funny guy named Archbishop Markus Sittikus. He filled the grounds with trick fountains - when you think you’re walking down a lovely garden path, swoosh! the fountains spit water horizontally or diagonally or whichever way you least expect it. We took the night tour, so this photo is just a link to the official site. It shows the outdoor dining table where the Archbishop would serve his guests fine meals, and then for “dessert” he’d shoot water up through their chairs.
The next morning - our final day in Salzburg - we stopped in at the Salzburg Zoo on our way out of town. This totally put us over the top in terms of getting more value from those tourist passes than we paid for! It was a nice zoo, though the day was just a bit too sunny and hot. And yes, I realize that this picture is of a fake lion, not a real one! The real one had recently died and they were fundraising to get another one. We put a Euro into his mouth, just to be supportive.
Next stop: Munich!
This is the end of part 3 - need more?
Family Vacation Part 1
Family Vacation Part 2
Family Vacation Part 4
We headed to Bolzano for a few days in the mountains. This area was once part of Austria, but was annexed by the Italians after World War I. Mussolini came in and changed all the German names to Italian (thus the two city names!) and imported a bunch of natives from other Italian provinces to try to make the region more Italian. Still, most of the people we ran into spoke German, and all signs were in both German and Italian.
Driving north, we did have a few scary moments on the mountain roads. These roads are incredibly steep, with frequent 180 degree turns, and only occasionally are there mirrors on the road so you can see what might be coming in the other direction. Luckily, we didn’t get killed. Luckily, I had a large bottle of Tums with me.
The town of Bozen is beautiful, with a classic town square and plenty of walking paths, tiny gardens, and (of course) a cable car that runs up the mountain to Oberbozen. But I enjoyed the town of Kastelruth (or Castelrotto) a little bit better. Like Bozen, it’s a beautiful alpine village with scenic stuff everywhere!
It’s steep, though, with most roads built right into the slope of the mountain. We walked up Kalvarienberg path to an old Roman encampment that’s since been turned into part of a series of sculptures that represent the stations of the cross. My family didn’t think I’d make it all the way to the top, but I did! Like other vistas, they look so much like photographs or paintings that I can hardly believe they’re real, but as you can see by photo of Heidi below, we really were there!
Another thing that’s hard to believe is the whole living-statue thing. These are people who dress up and pretend to be statues in the hopes of getting some spare change (rather than play guitar on the street corners or simply begging for money). The one below was in the town of Brixen.
Next we headed out to Innsbruck, Austria. You can see the old Olympic as you drive into the city, though we didn’t actually go up to visit it. Innsbruck is another gorgeous city, and we found a place to stay that was right across the river from the old downtown (or Centrum). Guess what we saw there? Yup, more “living statues”.
And of course, we did other stuff too! Highlights in Innsbruck were the Grassmayr Glockenjesser Seit (a bell foundry that’s been in continuous operation since 1599) and the medieval castle Schloss Ambras.
I’d like to spend some more time in Innsbruck, it was the first city we left before I felt really ready to move on. We left kind of late, and didn’t get to our next destination (Berchtesgaden) until dusk. We did have a chance for a quick evening walk near the hotel, though - and were warmly greeted by a herd of sheep.
This is the end of part 2 - need more?
Family Vacation Part 1
Family Vacation Part 3
Family Vacation Part 4
Our family went to Europe for vacation this month, and overall, we had a great time! It was pretty rough just getting there - we had to spend a night in Dallas (!); change not just airplanes but airPORTS in New York; and sit for 8.5 hours in coach seats in a fully-loaded plane.
When we arrived (at Malpensa Airport, just outside of Milan), wouldn’t you know it, the first thing we see is a big poster for Disney’s Jonas Brothers movie! I guess some things are more global than others.
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Just because we were at the airport doesn’t mean we’re done with the “getting there” part, though. The bus from the airport took about 45 minutes to get to downtown Milan, where we had the very convenient Tourist Information Office find us a reasonably-priced hotel. Just another 15 minute walk, and we could finally say “we’re here!”
But it was still only 10am, so there was time to do a bit of sightseeing. We took the subway - amazingly easy to navigate, even though we don’t speak any Italian. |
Turns out, they take the whole “church” thing pretty seriously, and the primary mission of the guard at the gate was to enforce dress code. Heidi was wearing shorts and a halter top, so was NOT allowed to go in! Though there were many Indian women selling sheer scarfs large enough to wrap around as skirts, or drape over shoulders, we decided that the outside of the building was attraction enough for us on Day 1 of our trip. We headed back, but stopped for our first Italian meal at a “Pizzeria OK” - beer and pizza for everyone!
| The hotel, like all the other hotels for the rest of our trip, included breakfast as part of the room rate. Not surprisingly, it was a “continental” breakfast that consisted mostly of meat, cheese, and rolls. They did bring us coffee (and tea) - but even the regular coffee was in teeny-tiny cups. Just to be sure that we got the most out of our 24-hour subway passes, we decided to go visit the “Leonardo DaVinci Museum of Science and Technology.” They had lots of interesting things there, and was definitely a hands-on kind of place where they encouraged touching and interaction. The technology part included (as you might expect) a bunch of models that recreated some of DaVinci’s sketches, as well as extensive exhibits on radio and other communication mechanisms. What surprised me the most was that there were also DaVinci artworks all over the place, as well as copies - the picture (below) is of a copy of “The Last Supper” that was actually painted around the year 1600. This worked out pretty well, because we never did get to see the original (you have to book tickets well in advance, and we’re the “winging it” type of travelers). |
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Though we’d probably do it differently now, we had arranged for a rental car starting on Saturday, figuring we’d need the first day just for resting up. The rest of day 2 was used up by getting BACK to Malpensa, waiting for the rental place to open up, finding the car, and then driving back to the hotel in the center of Milan.
On the way out of town, we decided to stop at the Castello (Castle!) Sforzesco. It’s huge, with all kinds of interesting exhibits including lots of paintings, wooden and marble sculptures, an Egyptian exhibit, a museum of architecture, and more. Just the building itself was pretty interesting, with cats and peacocks roaming all over the place.
All in all, a lovely visit to a beautiful city…
UNTIL we got back to our rental car. It looked fine from the outside, but it only took about a minute to realize that ALL of our electronics had been stolen while we were in the Castello. IiPods, DVD players, a brand new iPhone, etc. Heidi lost the most, including some brand-name stuff like a Coach bag and Ed Hardy sweatshirt (both of which are appallingly expensive). Guess the thieves had good taste. We managed to find a police station, and explain in guide-book phrases that we’d had a theft. The policemen nodded and pulled out a theft-report form in ENGLISH! Apparently this happens all the time. While I was there, a French couple came in with the same complaint, and got a form that was in French. The officer told me that they usually recovered about 30% of the reported thefts, but I wasn’t holding out much hope. DEFINITELY time to leave Milan!
This is the end of part 1 - need more?
Family Vacation Part 2
Family Vacation Part 3
Family Vacation Part 4
I had a great time at South by Southwest last spring, and I’m very excited about attending again next March. This year, I even submitted a proposal called “All About Audience: Improving User Experience”. The event organizers have posted my submission (along with over 2,000 other proposals) to the Panel Picker at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com. The idea is for the community at large to vote (simple thumbs-up YES or thumbs-down NO) to indicate which are likely to be the most popular sessions. The program team will then use the results of the vote as input into the selection procedure.
You don’t have to attend SXSW to vote, but you do have to register at the panel-picker website (it only takes a few seconds). Once at the panel picker site, you can search by submitter name, or topic, or category, or keyword - it’s mostly pretty easy to navigate.
While I hope to get lots of votes (please vote YES for me!) I would also love to see lots of my colleagues from STC and other organizations bring the importance of technical communication to this potentially huge audience. I’m definitely voting YES for the following sessions:
Brenda Huettner (All About Audience: Improving User Experience)
John Hedtke (Co-Authoring without Homicide)
Karen Bachmann (Strategic User Experience: Not Just for Products Anymore)
Alan Porter (Wikis are Wonderful - Or Are They? AND Spandex and Software: Can Comics Get You to Read the Manual?)
Charlene Kingston (Reach Your Diverse Audience with a Persona Strategy AND Designing Products that Change User Behavior)
Sarah O’Keefe (Will User-Generated Content Wipe Out Technical Writers?)
Rahel Bailie (Greening Your Content)
Got other suggestions for me? Put them in the comments, below.
And make sure to vote!
Some of you may remember that I published a WWII book a few years ago - written by Harry A. Franck in 1944-45, it’s the story of the 9th Air Force in the ETO. As part of that effort, we set up a web site (cleverly called www.harryafranck.com) and sent copies of the book to many of the men mentioned in it. “Winter Journey Through the Ninth” is available through the site or Amazon, though as you might expect, after several years in print, sales have declined to what you’d have to call “minimal.”
As a result of that effort, I get lots of email and sometimes phone calls from people who typically have one of two questions:
1. “My (father/grandfather/uncle/relative/neighbor) was in the 9th Air Force, and he just passed away - can you tell me about his experience?”
Well, no I can’t. Unless he was one of the 200+ men mentioned in the book (and there’s a list of their names on the site), I have no idea what it was like for anyone in 1944-45. Though I can’t help these individuals, I do want to share the lesson with everyone else. The time to ask this question is while your *whoever* is still around to answer for himself! And I’m not limiting this just to WWII survivors - talk to ALL your older relatives and friends, help them to see the importance of capturing their stories while you can.
2. “I (or my father/grandfather/uncle/relative/neighbor) was in the 9th Air Force, and have a great story to tell! Can you help me publish it?”
Well, no I can’t, not really. “Winter Journey Through the Ninth” was definitely a labor of love, not a profit-making enterprise. No offense to anyone else’s family, but I just don’t have the passion or energy to do that much work again for someone I don’t know.
But I CAN help a little bit with both of these questions by pointing out that there are lots of people and organizations who are trying to capture these types of stories and preserve them for the future. Here’s just a few resources - either for learning about what those times were like, OR for contributing your piece of the larger story.
Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project provides forms and helpful hints on turning your notes into a story. They’ve got a whole archive of finished projects online.
The Army Air Forces Historical Association actually sell some of their collected oral histories.
The National WWII Museum has small set of oral histories, and lots of other information and events and programs.
“Our WWII Veterans” is a private organization that preserves WWII stories and also tries to help fund trips for veterans to visit the memorial in DC.
The EHistory site at OSU has a large resource set of primary sources for a lot of time frames, not just WWII. Easy to waste a lot of time looking through their fascinating info!
There are often projects for subsets of the larger “WWII” category - for example, the Oral History project at Rutgers University works hard to capture WWII stories with a New Jersey tie-in, and there are lots of organizations devoted to the sub-sets of the 9th or other Air Forces (such as the 391st Bomb Group Association.
Check out the History Channel’s “Save Our History” effort - lots of different topics, and links to resources for educators.
The important thing to remember throughout all of this is that EVERYONE’S story is valuable. Write things down, pull out the old cassette recorder, video tape where appropriate! Even just making sure that all those old photos have written captions on the back is a huge step toward saving what will become the story of your family.
My name is Brenda Huettner, and I'm a technical communicator. You can read more about why I started this blog on my "About Me" page.
Click on the button above to vote for my proposal to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (March 2010 in Austin, TX) - "All About Audience". You don't have to attend to enter a vote (though you do have to register with your name and email address). It's a tough competition, and every vote will help! Thanks!
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