I have done a lot of the shows as a presenter/demo jock for a few software firms. Went to one smallish "local" trade show and one of the other attendees looked familiar. Comparing resumes, we had met up number of times when both of us had held several different positions with several different firms. The same players do a lot of musical chairs.

"Flattened Fauna" is an older book by Ten Speed Press. The subtitle of the revised edition is, "A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways." One of the more amusing notes is that unlike most guides that list the type of camera used to take the photos, this book lists the type of copier.

At one point we were on a monthly push for a web-based application. I was stuck in documentation and got all my changes last minute. Once I was told, "The software is ready, are the Help docs?" I asked for a day to see what the software had morphed into to make sure the docs were still OK and to then write/fix what had to be fixed only for the most current changes/new features. My problem was with the monthly pushes, QA was locked in testing the code and stopped reviewing the docs as they had no time to check the code. After a number of release cycles, all the un-reported code changes had altered the software so much the docs were wrong. I could never explain that I had no talent for fiction. I was not sufficiently creative to rewrite the docs just so they could be wrong. Every single page was reviewed at least once. However, given that I was barely keeping up with new/fixes, a complete rewrite to match months of changes was not possible. The software is only as good as the Help.

Once upon a time I was driving a dealer's diesel Rabbit while my gas version was in the shop. The diesel got great mileage BUT was anything but quick. In Southwestern PA, you had to seriously plan your shifts and allow a big space before entering a nominal 55 mph roadway. On some stretches I had do 3rd to get up the hills, 4th gear lacked power.

Once upon a time I wrote software docs. I pushed out 12,000 pages in one year. Another "record" was 25 pages generated from a single small yellow Post-It! note -- the product was an embedded systems compiler. The note listed a new set of features (each denoted by a single character compiler flag option) being added to a "target" environment. During review, I had a single context sensitive typo and the developer started to screech at me for being a lousy writer. I asked how long it would have taken him to create the docs and he replied a month. I shot back, "You review the docs for 1/2 hour and find one error in 25 pages and it took me two days. Just shut up and walk away." The best revenge was after I left. I was replaced with a non-working manager and THREE other writers. They complained about the workload and ended up doing 1/3 as much as I did. The kicker was that I was on MANDATORY 50 hour weeks but rarely worked less than 70.

My sole computer class in HS and college was THE class senior year of HS in 1971. We used an acoustic modem to talk to a local university computer, some IBM box. The language was BASIC. Storage space for the school of 3,500 was either 8 or 10KB (not a typo, it really was kilobytes). Anything bigger was written on paper tape at a teletype. I used password protection and could create programs that the teachers could not touch. That said, my entire career has been computer-based. First job was computerized equipment test and data acquisition. After 6 months as lead programmer, my boss asked how much prior experience I had. When I said none, she asked me to never tell that to anyone else and keep up the good work. I saved the company well over $500,000 in testing expenses that year. Since then I have done statistical QA, CAD, FEA and software docs. There were also a few years writing for the trade press.