Yesterday our little gray cat escaped, because someone left the gate open. Shannon said Callie had spent a lot of time playing with the cat in the backyard. Anyway, "Nimbus" (the new name Avery gave the cat) was gone by the time I returned home after work. The kids felt the cat would return, just like Amelia does, but she didn't. We'd had the cat for about 3 days now, without any call from the owners. I figured it must have been a stray. Sha...
Tonight I spent most of the evening finishing up some video tutorials for work. Didn't finish until 7 pm. Shannon was out at Education Week with Marcy all evening, so I had all four kids. I pretty much neglected them until about 7pm, when I fed them dinner and made them clean up a bit. Then at 8 pm, I wanted to do something, so I insisted we go for a jog. I put the baby and Lucy in the bike carrier (it doubles as a stroller) and let Callie rid...
A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, by Brian Suda A Practical Guide to Designing with Data (Five Simple Steps, 2010), by Brian Suda, is a thorough exploration of best practices for graphs and charts. It's somewhat similar to Edward Tufte's Visualizing Information in focus, and both have a shared antipathy toward "chart junk" in the effort to tell the story of data. Suda explains, The main purpose of this book is to encourage you to ...
This weekend was a lazy weekend, a kind of "stillness before the storm" time before the school and swimming year starts. I spent Saturday at home, reading and playing with the kids. While Shannon took Avery shopping for school clothes (and her first bra), I helped build a fort for Callie and Lucy. This fort has an ingenious construction. I asked Callie what she wanted to do, and she said she wanted to build a house. Both of them wanted to make...
The following are brief messages from my sponsors for August. Two New Announcements from MadCap Software Sylvan Learning Uses MadCap Flare to Provide Web-based Help for Employees at 900-Plus Tutoring Centers "We really liked the efficiency of an authoring tool that would let us publish to both print and the Web. And after getting so many great references for Flare from the tech writer community, we decided it was the right software for o...
I've been somewhat bothered by the fact that I don't read much fiction. For someone who has a degree in creative writing, this is a bit troubling. My degree is in nonfiction creative writing, but still, you would think that I read a novel a week or more. Not really. Not too long after my MFA, I went through a burnout phase. During my 3 years at Columbia, I wrote a lot of stories and essays. They were all a type of literary writing. I spen...
For family home evening we went to the Thanksgiving Point Gardens and drew pictures with sidewalk chalk.
This weekend I had to replace the solenoid in my Frigidaire Gallery refrigerator. The solenoid controls the flow of water into the ice maker, among other things. I'm not a technician, so when I received the new solenoid and looked at the instructions, I was a little hesitant to do what the text said. The instructions said to cut off the ends of the water tubes. I was supposed to actually cut off the nozzles at the ends of all the tubing (...
Carol Barnum The following is a guest post by Carol Barnum, a professor at Southern Polytechnic State University. My university recently purchased a content management system (CMS) as part of a complete redo of our website, long overdue. A content management system is supposed to simplify the process of managing content on the web. Maybe some CMS systems do, but not the one chosen for my university. As the person responsible for managing...
Joe Welinske's latest book, Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps (published June 2011), fills a gap in tech comm literature that is sorely needed. Joe explores strategies and techniques for providing user assistance for mobile devices, and goes in depth with iOS, Android, Windows, and tablets. Early in the book, he explains: Hopefully the organizations that employ us will start buying smartphone devices for us to work with just as t...
Yesterday Avery had a county swim meet that included all the swim teams in Utah county -- Payson, Spanish Fork, Lindon, Provo, Pleasant Grove, and Lehi. To accommodate all the swimmers, they divide the swimmers into three groups: bronze, silver, and gold. Avery qualified for the gold meet. She swam four events: 50 free, 25 backstroke, 25 breaststroke, and a 100 freestyle relay. I sat in the bleachers at the top. The event began at 7am and last...
I'm not sure why, but I've decided to keep a better journal, and to carry my camera around taking lots of pictures. For one, taking pictures is a lot of fun. But also, I sense that my kids are growing up, cementing their sense of identity, and soon they will be going off to high school, and then college, and then they will be gone. I guess I am trying to capture and preserve these moments. I love how these flowers droop. I'm not sure why -...
When I think about my past, the only thing that matters -- or at least so it seems -- is family. Looking at old pictures of the kids, how they have changed. How Shannon and I have changed too. It puts life in perspective. I need to prioritize my life so that, going forward, I do things that have the most value. It almost sounds cliche to write it, but when I think of the past, all that seems to matter is family, family, family. Everything else...
Aaron and Tara Carpenter and their kids are visiting. After we came home from Church, they and Shannon all wanted to take a nap, but the kids had a lot of energy. I had good sleep the night before, so I decided to take them on an adventure while the others slept. We went to the Spring View Farms Trail. This is the trailhead at Spring View Farms Trail -- about 14400 S and Redwood It was about 95 degrees out. The kids were practically melting in...
Work has been up and down lately. I was distressed to see the new dress and grooming section for sister missionaries, as it seemed much more a fashion catalog than something designed for people entering spiritual service. But perhaps I overreacted, and my post on the internal social network led to quite a stir. In the end, I probably made more enemies than friends. I've also been pondering the best way to go -- focus on writing, on screencast...
