Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Life takes some interesting twists and turns, with things popping up out of unexpected places. Here are a few work-related things from the past couple of weeks in no particular order:

• As I mentioned the other week, my time on the big project for the Queensland company is coming to an end. They’ve employed a full-time Brisbane-based replacement for me. He starts this Monday and I do handover with him next week. I’m fine with it—my other boss there still wants me on board for other work, but we’ve yet to work out the details of how much time etc.
• I get a phone call this week from a lovely lady I’ve worked with before. She works for a BIG global oil and gas company, and has wanted me to do work on her project for some months. She hasn’t been ready—and I haven’t been available. Meantime, one of her colleagues desperately needs someone to help out the full-time tech writer with environmental reports for submission to government etc. It sounds like it’s just formatting, troubleshooting Word issues (my favourite task, NOT!), editing, and PDFing ready for submission. Once the administrative and contract stuff is sorted, I should start on that part time late August/early September. I’ve been told it’s a minimum 6 month contract, so that’s good.
• I’ve picked up some ad hoc Author-it consulting work with a company in Israel. So far it’s involved setting up HTML templates and troubleshooting Word template issues. Because it’s too expensive for them to do electronic bank transfers per invoice, we’ve set up a prepaid situation where they pay for 10 hours in advance, I send them detailed timesheets as I go, and then send them a new invoice when the prepaid 10 hours is nearly up. So far, we’ve put in place two prepaid plans.
• My great friend, Char, asked me if I’d like to be a moderator for an email list of some nearly 7000 Help authors around the world. The main moderator, Bill (*waves to Bill*), has left his position and Char has taken it on (amongst the hundreds of other things she does in a day!). But they needed another moderator to fill the gap so that it wasn’t left in the hands of just two people. It’s not arduous work—just watching out for spammers who want to join the list, and monitoring the first few posts of newbies. So now we have true 24/7 coverage—Char’s in North America, Paula is in Israel, and I’m in Australia. We have all time zones covered!
• Oh, and I’m off to Sydney at the end of October to spend a few days in the Queensland company’s Sydney office (where my other boss is now located), and to speak at a conference there.
• And then yesterday I get a call from an old friend who I worked with back in the late 90s at Hamersley Iron, and they’re coming down this way early in October. They love wine so it’ll be an opportunity to introduce them to the wines of this region and to catch up on lots of gossip! (Yes, Suzanne—it’s B&L)
• Almost forgot! A few weeks back I wrote some comments on a great article that Luke Wroblewski wrote on the UXMatters website. The editor emailed me and asked me to write an article or a series based on the information in the presentation I did at the WritersUA and AODC Conferences. So I’ve been busy with that and sent off my 6000 words yesterday.
• Yesterday was another ‘completion’ day too! One of the things that I put off until I can’t put it off any longer is getting together all the information for our annual tax returns (personal and company). But I got an email from the accountant earlier this month telling me she’s pregnant and could we please have our stuff in to her by the end of August as she’s going on maternity leave in October. Brisbane had a public holiday yesterday, so it was an ideal time to get it done. Courtesy of Express Post, it’s gone and she should have received it today.
• Oh, and I washed my car yesterday too—it really needed it! It’s been so wet lately that I haven’t had a chance; yesterday was lovely and sunny. Not hot, or even very warm, but sunny.

At a more personal level, my friend Bobbie has offered me her almost brand new sewing machine to test for a couple of weeks. It’s a Husqvarna Sapphire 830, so it doesn’t have the things I really like about the Sapphire 870, like the auto thread cutters, but it will give me a good feel for the machine. She may offer it to me for purchase as she’s thinking of upgrading her Pfaff to the new model when it gets released in a month or two. But thanks to her generosity, I get to try it out for a while before making a decision. Now, I just have to find the time to get back to those quilt blocks! I’ve got the log cabin ones all made—I just haven’t had time to start putting them together yet.

My friend Steph posted this YouTube video on her blog the other day. For me it was a real ‘laugh out loud, tears running down down my face’ video, bringing back fond (?) memories of my now long-departed Anouschka. If you’ve ever had a cat, you’ll relate!

We’d like to incorporate photo-voltaic cells in our new house, if and when we ever build it (the stock market meltdown and the direct effect of that on our retirement funds have put all plans on hold…). Why? Well, the thought of not being 100% reliant on an external power supply is the main reason, then there are the carbon footprint/green reasons.

When we first saw these systems, we were impressed. But not impressed with the approximately $20,000 price at the time. Then we found that the Federal Government offered a substantial rebate to householders who decided to install them (somewhere between $8000 and $12000), making them much more affordable.

But since then we’ve had a change of federal government, to one that rode the coat tails of ‘being green’ to get into power. The same government that now wants to commit Australian companies to a draconian Emissions Trading Scheme (don’t get me started…). Anyhow, this new ‘green’ government has decided to apply a ‘means test’ to photo-voltaic cell systems for households, so you only get a partial rebate if your household earns less than $100,000 per year. Well, you only need two income earners on $51,000 a year each and you’re already over that mark.

My understanding is that the whole idea of these household systems is twofold:

• to make homeowners partially self-sufficient for their electricity supply
• to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions required to create and deliver electricity.

Now, if the federal government is serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions created by producing and delivering electricity, then it should be doing everything in its power to get these solar cells on to every Australian rooftop. That doesn’t mean bringing in a means test for the rebate! It means subsidising the industry (gee, that’s a dirty word these days) to the point where the price is such that purchasing and installing such a product is as cheap as buying a new TV. It means making a serious difference in the way that we use the one unlimited and free resource we have plenty of—sunshine! It means looking at the small things (like photo-voltaic cells on rooftops) as well as the big ones (the proposed solar array installations that will cost billions of dollars, take up massive amounts of land, yet only service about 50,000 households).

Anyhow, if you live in Australia and feel as pissed off annoyed about this change to the rebate conditions as I do, then head on over and sign the petition organised by the Channel 7 “Sunrise” team. So far there are nearly 50,000 signatures. Maybe yours can make a difference.

You can add your name to the petition here:
http://sunrisefamily.com.au/current/petition/index.php

Just because I haven’t blogged for a while doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. Yes, we’re in the depths of winter, and this year is much colder than last—I checked the weather bureau’s daily stats on maxima and minima for June and July and it seems we’re about 2 degrees colder each day than last year. The heater’s been on quite a bit so far!

So, what have I been up to? In no particular order:

• Quilting: I’ve finally finished all 144 blocks for my log cabin quilt (168 if you count the 24 blue guys that I decided not to use!). I haven’t taken photos of each of the colourways yet, and haven’t started to pull the blocks together into a quilt top, but small steps… I think getting 144 block completed in my spare time was an achievement, considering each one took about 15 minutes to do. It’s amazing how they add up when you do a couple each evening after finishing work. Oh, and while watching the football on TV.
• Travel: I went up to Perth for the office ‘end of financial year’ lunch. Although the lunch was only a half day, I travelled up on the Sunday, spent all of Monday in the office plus Tuesday morning, then we had the lunch on the Tuesday afternoon. On the Wednesday I did a lot of running around (dentist—had to have a filling; hairdresser; old bank to collect new VISA card) before driving home. And a couple of weeks ago we went over to Busselton to have lunch with my folks, and for my husband to go see Hancock (which he enjoyed). While he was at the movies, I looked at stoves (the one in the rental property has died) and laptops, and did a bit of shopping.
• Catching up with friends and family: While in Perth, I caught up with friends for dinner on the Sunday night, and with my nieces and nephew and their respective partners for dinner on the Monday. There was the work lunch on Tuesday, and then I had breakfast with a couple of ex-work colleagues (is that how it’s hyphenated?) on Wednesday morning so it was a bit of an eating feast! But there’s never enough time to catch up with everyone… It was fabulous seeing the nieces and nephews again! I’ve hardly seen them since we left Perth, and definitely not all together like that.
• Computer issues: I took my PC to Perth with me to get it serviced. Nothing was wrong with it, but I was getting regular ‘overheating’ messages which I’d been told to ignore. But I didn’t like them—getting a message that the computer is running at 70C when it’s only 10C in the house is a worry! Anyhow, the PC Guru guys looked it over, did some cleaning and testing and found that my power supply was nearly gone (something about capacitors?). So they replaced that, installed SP3 for Windows XP, did some other tweaks, and I packed up my baby in the car and brought her home. SP3 gave me a few problems, which I’ve documented on my professional blog, but they seem to be sorted now. I also had issues with installing Acrobat 9 on my aging laptop. And as a result decided to get a replacement laptop! It’s been something I’ve been considering for a while, so I bit the bullet. I pick it up next Thursday when we’re in Busselton, and it will have Vista on it so I’ll get a chance to try it out, as well as install Office 2007 and try it out too. I’ve been wanting to test Office 2007 for a while, but not on my production machine while all my clients still use Office 2003. Mmmm… new toy! (I’m trying not to remember the pain of installing lots of apps…)
• Work stuff: I was told by my boss that the division of the Brisbane company that I work for had decided that the volume of work coming in was now sufficient for them to employ a full time tech writer in the Brisbane office (which it is). No big deal—that’s the life of a contractor. So I’ve helped them find someone in Brisbane (yes, I know people in all sorts of places!) and he starts with them mid August. There’ll be some handover time, but I expect to be off that project towards the end of August. There’s other work at the company my other boss there wants me to do, but I’m not sure of the arrangements for that. I suspect that it won’t be enough for three full days, but we’ll see. Meantime, all sorts of other possible opportunities have been cropping up from people I’ve worked with before. We’ll see what comes of those…
• Stuff related to the technical communication profession: I was asked to be on an editorial advisory panel for Intercom, the non-academic journal produced by the Society for Technical Communication (STC). We’ve had one meeting so far, which was an interesting exercise in logistics for the organiser and others in the group as I was the only one based outside the US. While I’m very familiar with issues arising from working and communicating across international time zones, most of the others weren’t, so if nothing else, they’re gaining an appreciation of the global nature of the organisation! I’ve also been asked to be a co-moderator of one of the biggest user groups for those involved in Help authoring, and have been asked to write some articles for an Australia/New Zealand technical communication publication, and for an international web magazine that focuses on user experience issues. I was also asked to be on a panel but that was in Perth and required me to be on site for just 90 minutes, so I passed along the details of a friend who I was confident could ‘fly the flag’ for technical writing.
• Enjoying the birds: We have a great variety of birds that pass through the airspace above our backyard, occasionally stopping to sample parts of the garden. We regularly get red-capped parrots and ring-necked parrots (a.k.a. Twenty-Eights and Port Lincoln parrots) foraging on the back lawn, magpies, New Holland honeyeaters, wattle birds, willy wagtails, the occasional kookaburra, and just lately, the most gorgeous tiny Splendid Blue Wrens, with their bright blue iridescent plumage (no, I didn’t take this picture!).

Well, I think there are winds of change in the air. Nothing I can put my finger on, but as I look at this list it seems that parts of my life will be going in different directions soon. That’s not scary—just an observation.

I was trawling through some old ‘sent’ emails in an vain attempt to delete some of my thousands of accumulated emails, when I came across this one I sent out a couple of years ago.

A chap I’ve recently done some work for has been asked to do some work for these people: http://www.minti.com/ It’s a site for parents all about raising kids. It works on the principle of free advice, word of mouth hints/ideas, etc., not advice about parenting from “the experts”.

Just thought those of you with kids may appreciate this resource.

I just checked and the website still exists and seems to be pretty active. There are some 6500 questions and pieces of advice, all ranked according to their usefulness to the readers; some 8000 questions; and some 25,500 members.

Not being a parent, I have no clue as to whether the advice is sound or not!

… it would solve a lot of the world’s energy supply problems. It seems so simple, and if the execution is anywhere near as brilliant as the idea and if it’s affordable, then we need no longer rely on oil, gas and coal for powering an awful lot of stuff.

What am I talking about? Nano Vent-Skin. Tiny wind turbines connected via a mesh that covers a building, roof, wall, vehicle etc. to produce electricity to power that object.

For details and some cool photos see:

• http://tinyurl.com/4ncmzt (CNN Science article)
  
• http://nanoventskin.blogspot.com/

If only…

Update 27 July 2008: Something similar is in the plans by Philips, again incorporating very small elements to create energy, water, and light. You can see the details here:
http://www.design.philips.com/probes/projects/sustainable_habitat_2020/index.page

When I popped in to town the other day, I saw that the florist and a couple of other shops were plastered with “Go Deb!” and “Australia’s Got Talent” signs. It seems that a local Bridgetown grandmother, 67-year old Deb Perry, has made the grand final of this national TV talent quest. Her talent? Spoons!!

There’s a couple of videos of her on YouTube. For her age, she’s enviably fit and flexible! The first video is of her getting in to the competition; the second is the performance that got her into the grand final, which I think may be next week and the last one is her grand final appearance. Now it’s up to the voters…

Warning: This video contains images of male and female mammary glands (the other words may be censored by certain filtering systems).

When our friend Dave stayed with us last week, we did quite a bit of sharing of various YouTube videos we found amusing or that showed some performers one or the other wasn’t familiar with. One of the ones that Dave put us on to was this country song by Rodney Carrington, where you can see how easy it is to get what you want, just by wrapping it up in a song!

The song is called “Show them to me”, so if you think you’ll be offended, don’t watch it!

I read an interesting snippet on someone’s blog the other day. It’s stayed with me. I guess I might be contemplating this one for a while…

“We are not humans having a spiritual experience, we are spirit having a human experience.”

One of the companies I work for listed for the first time on the Australian Stock Exchange on Tuesday. The opening share price was $1 a share. Many employees took advantage of the opportunity to get an allocation at that price, with no broker fees etc. Some already had employee share options which were converted to tradeable shares. I was able to buy some at this $1 price too.

Well, on the day of listing the price jumped to $1.18 per share! It seems the Australian offices were very hyped (I know of one office where they ran a ‘book’ on what the closing price would be on Day One—typical Aussies!)

In these days of share market doom and gloom that was pretty phenomenal and represents an 18% return. Not bad! Today the price is hovering around $1.16.

So how do you get hooked? Well, like others who had purchased shares at $1 each, I was interested to see what the first days would bring, so I went on to a share market site and found myself clicking ‘refresh’ a few too many times that day to be classed as a casual observer (*laugh*).

The ones who are really smiling though are like one of the ladies I work with—she has over 1m tradeable shares converted from all those she and her husband garnered in the 20+ years they have both worked for the company. An 18% return on $1m is some $180,000. Not a bad income for one day!!!

Update 5 June 2008: Little more than a week after opening, the price is now $1.25.