On Labor Day my New York sound designer son had me read some scripts for voiceovers in an upcoming video game. He turned to me because he doesn't know any "old men in New York," as he explained, and needed someone whose voice had "matured" with the rasp and crackling punctuations of middle age. Fine by me, I said, and while his brother recorded me in his school media center studio in Kissimmee, I read the lines in the the best characters I could muster as an amateur.
I don't know if they'll actually use what we sent up electronically, but I got a congratulatory cellphone call on our way home from the Disney parks saying I did a really good job. If they can't use it, it will be because of the limitations of our recording equipment and ambient studio noise rather than my lack of good stuff. It made me feel just great.
What was revealing to me was how many ways there are to say the shortest dialogue lines in a recording. One of my characters spoke only three words, but I had to record it dozens of times and learn background motivation and the situation for the utterance to get it anywhere near "right." It gave me a new appreciation for what actors and actresses have to do, involving not only all of what I did but with action and expression as well, and without the script in front of them, by memory, scene after scene. No wonder they're so exhausted with their long hours and so flamboyant in their escapes and relationships. Acting's a whole lot harder than I ever realized, and so is production in general.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Good technical writers in high demand
Young people, consider a career as a technical writer. It pays well (though not as well as engineers or doctors), offers solid work and good promotional tracks, and because your work is much needed, you'll have steady employment opportunities your whole career. When you retire, you can still do it part-time or independently, and if you're good at it, it can be very satisfying.
Why are tech writers so needed? Consider that just about every product or service made and offered for sale must offer clear instructions/information/labels/warnings perhaps to the buyer/consumer on the nature of the product or service, its description, its features, how to put it together and take it apart, how to operate it, maintain it, service it or replace parts of it, etc. All of this information must usually be written and read.
But the people who design, manufacture, and sell the product often don't have a very good skill at communicating about the product to other people. So they hire technical writers to write the user manuals and instructions clearly.
What happens when poor or confusing instructions go out with the product? Their phone lines and emails get clogged with befuddled consumers seeking clarification and assistance, and that costs the company much more to staff and maintain than the good tech writer's compensation.
But why can't anyone write good instructions? It's in the way the person thinks. Engineers think in highly technical and precise ways, often quantitatively. They may do that naturally or by training and experience. But it's not natural for them to try to speak to the end user of their designs and systems directly in unambiguous, "layman's" terms the user is apt to understand clearly. Executives and sales personnel think in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, and again seldom understand the engineering/manufacturing complexities of their products. They are concerned with results and bottom lines, markets and features of products that work as intended, not with the inner workings of such products.
But technical writing is mainly concerned with bridging the gap between those with specialized knowledge of the product or service and consumers. Technical writers, ironically, usually don't need technical knowledge. But they do need curiosity and the ability to learn from the engineers and marketing people those things which the consumer needs to know. Above all they need to know how to ask the right questions and couch the answers in plain language.
I taught both technical writing and creative writing at a technical university, and I well remember the main difference I had to try to stress between the two: creative writing tries to suggest many meanings, connote rich associations, offer more than one interpretation; technical writing tries to eliminate all meanings except one. One clear, exact, singular meaning is what the technical writer hopes to convey to each reader, with no other interpretation possible, in every statement, every instruction.
With the society becoming more and more dependent upon sophisticated technology and communications, the future is bound to be bright for a good technical writer.
Why are tech writers so needed? Consider that just about every product or service made and offered for sale must offer clear instructions/information/labels/warnings perhaps to the buyer/consumer on the nature of the product or service, its description, its features, how to put it together and take it apart, how to operate it, maintain it, service it or replace parts of it, etc. All of this information must usually be written and read.
But the people who design, manufacture, and sell the product often don't have a very good skill at communicating about the product to other people. So they hire technical writers to write the user manuals and instructions clearly.
What happens when poor or confusing instructions go out with the product? Their phone lines and emails get clogged with befuddled consumers seeking clarification and assistance, and that costs the company much more to staff and maintain than the good tech writer's compensation.
But why can't anyone write good instructions? It's in the way the person thinks. Engineers think in highly technical and precise ways, often quantitatively. They may do that naturally or by training and experience. But it's not natural for them to try to speak to the end user of their designs and systems directly in unambiguous, "layman's" terms the user is apt to understand clearly. Executives and sales personnel think in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, and again seldom understand the engineering/manufacturing complexities of their products. They are concerned with results and bottom lines, markets and features of products that work as intended, not with the inner workings of such products.
But technical writing is mainly concerned with bridging the gap between those with specialized knowledge of the product or service and consumers. Technical writers, ironically, usually don't need technical knowledge. But they do need curiosity and the ability to learn from the engineers and marketing people those things which the consumer needs to know. Above all they need to know how to ask the right questions and couch the answers in plain language.
I taught both technical writing and creative writing at a technical university, and I well remember the main difference I had to try to stress between the two: creative writing tries to suggest many meanings, connote rich associations, offer more than one interpretation; technical writing tries to eliminate all meanings except one. One clear, exact, singular meaning is what the technical writer hopes to convey to each reader, with no other interpretation possible, in every statement, every instruction.
With the society becoming more and more dependent upon sophisticated technology and communications, the future is bound to be bright for a good technical writer.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Escape the heat to Florida? Actually, yes
The heat waves this summer over most of the nation are horrific, but worst in the north where such heat isn't normal and electric grids aren't up to handling the extra loads. And when the transformers and feeder lines blow, so do tops and tempers.
We used to stay at Barb's parents' house when we visited in northern Indiana each summer, and bake in the heat waves that came through, even in June. They had no AC till grandpa finally broke down and got a window unit for the living room a few years ago, but it wasn't able to cool or dehumidify the living quarters. Since we slept upstairs, it was so stifling even with window fans that we moved the mattress to the floor, and sometimes just sacked out on the living room carpet to get into the feeble stream of cooled air.
We've travelled in some of the super heat waves that killed several hundred people nationwide over the years, with temps well over 100 or even over 115, all the while praying the car unit wouldn't poop out on us, which it often did on our older vehicles. And this summer's cookers for days or weeks on end have turned St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and other megacities into griddles with no escape.
We've come into Las Vegas in 120 degree heat and abandoned our VW camper for the only night in an AC''d motel. We've camped in Tennessee in 108 degrees and spent nearly the whole day in the pool. But it's always worst where these kinds of conditions are not normal, where tenements are without air conditioning and where people uncap the hydrants to get into a spritz of relief.
That's why I can't complain about living in good old South Florida, where the rest of the country assumes we'd be the worst off in these heat waves but are not. Our daytime highs are in the 90's but not unbearable because there's AC wherever we go, in all our homes and all our cars and trucks, trains and busses. Air conditioning opened the South to development, it is said--made the southern states tolerable places in which to live and work, not just someplace exotic to visit. Because it's the norm to need conditioned air more or less all year long here, we're prepared for it.
But it's not the heat that drives us all to the refuge of our air conditioned spaces; it's the humidity. Ask anyone who has been here in July or August and they will all say the same thing: it's not the heat, it's the humidity. And the humidity is caused by the fact that our state juts out 600 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded on three sides by water, we always have that moderating sea/land breeze to keep the air moving slightly and avoid the force-air highs, domes of fire which sit for weeks over other states and literally cook everything: crops, structures, animals and people. But the humidity, which make it impossible to work outside for more than five minutes at a time without coming in with your clothes soaking wet, is the very thing that keeps our temperatures lower and more moderated than the drier, blowtorch heat waves plagueing the rest of the nation. So our humidity is our great blessing in disguise.
I walk each day, usually before nine. But I always come back in with a perspiring brow and spotted tee-shirt. So this morning, in celebration of August, I changed from my usual jeans to shorts. It didn't help that much. I still spot-perspired through. But I was not uncomfortable, and a few minutes in the air conditioned drier air inside made everything hunky-dory. That's why I'll take the humid heat here over the dryer heat waves elsewhere every time. It's hard to believe, but if you want to escape the heat, come to South Florida!
We used to stay at Barb's parents' house when we visited in northern Indiana each summer, and bake in the heat waves that came through, even in June. They had no AC till grandpa finally broke down and got a window unit for the living room a few years ago, but it wasn't able to cool or dehumidify the living quarters. Since we slept upstairs, it was so stifling even with window fans that we moved the mattress to the floor, and sometimes just sacked out on the living room carpet to get into the feeble stream of cooled air.
We've travelled in some of the super heat waves that killed several hundred people nationwide over the years, with temps well over 100 or even over 115, all the while praying the car unit wouldn't poop out on us, which it often did on our older vehicles. And this summer's cookers for days or weeks on end have turned St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and other megacities into griddles with no escape.
We've come into Las Vegas in 120 degree heat and abandoned our VW camper for the only night in an AC''d motel. We've camped in Tennessee in 108 degrees and spent nearly the whole day in the pool. But it's always worst where these kinds of conditions are not normal, where tenements are without air conditioning and where people uncap the hydrants to get into a spritz of relief.
That's why I can't complain about living in good old South Florida, where the rest of the country assumes we'd be the worst off in these heat waves but are not. Our daytime highs are in the 90's but not unbearable because there's AC wherever we go, in all our homes and all our cars and trucks, trains and busses. Air conditioning opened the South to development, it is said--made the southern states tolerable places in which to live and work, not just someplace exotic to visit. Because it's the norm to need conditioned air more or less all year long here, we're prepared for it.
But it's not the heat that drives us all to the refuge of our air conditioned spaces; it's the humidity. Ask anyone who has been here in July or August and they will all say the same thing: it's not the heat, it's the humidity. And the humidity is caused by the fact that our state juts out 600 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded on three sides by water, we always have that moderating sea/land breeze to keep the air moving slightly and avoid the force-air highs, domes of fire which sit for weeks over other states and literally cook everything: crops, structures, animals and people. But the humidity, which make it impossible to work outside for more than five minutes at a time without coming in with your clothes soaking wet, is the very thing that keeps our temperatures lower and more moderated than the drier, blowtorch heat waves plagueing the rest of the nation. So our humidity is our great blessing in disguise.
I walk each day, usually before nine. But I always come back in with a perspiring brow and spotted tee-shirt. So this morning, in celebration of August, I changed from my usual jeans to shorts. It didn't help that much. I still spot-perspired through. But I was not uncomfortable, and a few minutes in the air conditioned drier air inside made everything hunky-dory. That's why I'll take the humid heat here over the dryer heat waves elsewhere every time. It's hard to believe, but if you want to escape the heat, come to South Florida!
Friday, July 28, 2006
Hey there, all you long-lost kin!
My wife's genealogy project hit a gold nugget last night when practically my dad's whole side of the family, whom I never knew, all showed up at once on a Mormon search engine.
I grew up thinking my dad was one of several boys and one sister, Aunt Marie, whom I only heard about sometimes because she had moved to South Africa. Now I learn I had also an Aunt Ann, who was a missionary to China. And instead of a couple of brothers, my dad was the youngest of five boys: Ray, Jesse, Harry, Stanly [sic], and John William, my father--"Billy" as they called him. Only Aunt Marie was younger.
And they were all born near Belfontaine, Ohio in the west Ohio farmlands of Logan County, not in eastern Ohio near Mansfield where Dad took me as a boy once and showed me the old homestead. Turns out the old farm, south of Canton, was probably where they moved. John Yoder Kauffman, my grandfather, died in Michigan in 1935 before I was born in 1939, so I never knew him or Ida, my grandmother.
When I grew up, moved to Chicago and went to art school and played piano bar downtown, I was contacted by my cousin Dr. Jim Kauffman, a surgeon who practised in Cleveland, and he took me out for a meal and to get acquainted. That was after my dad had died of a heart attack in 1955, and Jim's dad, I think Harry, had also died of heart failure. Apparently most of the brothers suffered the same coronary problems, so Dr. Jim cautioned me we'd both have to watch our hearts closely as we got older. The only other contacts with the Kauffman side of the family I remember vaguely was that we got together with the descendents of some of them once at a hotel in Cleveland and once at a lake in northern Indiana. There was a woman among them they called Connie and another, I think, called Laddie, but I don't think I ever saw any of them again.
What Barb discovered, though, really made me feel good, like Alex Haley finding his "Roots." What vexed me was that even though I tried the same genealogy sites she did, I couldn't find them. I have to admit that she's a better genealogist than I am, that she has the ability to follow clues and hunches better than I can. Mine got me nowhere. "Well," she reminds me, "I am a media specialist, after all." Grrr.
I learned also that Nelson, my first name, was a family name, not just given me by my brother after meeting Nelson Rockefeller as family legend always held--my mother, like me, was prone to exaggerate to make a good story-- and that there were many family names in the tree, and variant spellings. Barb's traced us from the farming Mennonites of Ohio back to the old German and Swiss farms of our European ancestors. And the further we go, the more surprises we find, folks we never heard of before.
For me, the curiosity ends with what she's already found. But for her and Scott, who gave her the software for this summer quest, it may go on to Eden. It is surely amazing how many of us there are, and were before us, and how difficult and Byzantine a search it can be to try to find them. There are many sites that charge a fortune for their access, and many government sites full of misinformation. Even some public county and state libraries guard their collections like Fort Knox or won't let you search their records online.
But Barb says women tend to be more concerned about genealogy than men, generally, and she's probably right. I don't know what that means, but I tend to agree. The main thing it has taught me is that I now realize that I am one of many, many people who found themselves on this earth and came to think they were one of a kind. I now realize that yes, I am unique in many ways; but more importantly I am only one of many, many others who comprise the rich, wonderfully diverse human fabric.
I grew up thinking my dad was one of several boys and one sister, Aunt Marie, whom I only heard about sometimes because she had moved to South Africa. Now I learn I had also an Aunt Ann, who was a missionary to China. And instead of a couple of brothers, my dad was the youngest of five boys: Ray, Jesse, Harry, Stanly [sic], and John William, my father--"Billy" as they called him. Only Aunt Marie was younger.
And they were all born near Belfontaine, Ohio in the west Ohio farmlands of Logan County, not in eastern Ohio near Mansfield where Dad took me as a boy once and showed me the old homestead. Turns out the old farm, south of Canton, was probably where they moved. John Yoder Kauffman, my grandfather, died in Michigan in 1935 before I was born in 1939, so I never knew him or Ida, my grandmother.
When I grew up, moved to Chicago and went to art school and played piano bar downtown, I was contacted by my cousin Dr. Jim Kauffman, a surgeon who practised in Cleveland, and he took me out for a meal and to get acquainted. That was after my dad had died of a heart attack in 1955, and Jim's dad, I think Harry, had also died of heart failure. Apparently most of the brothers suffered the same coronary problems, so Dr. Jim cautioned me we'd both have to watch our hearts closely as we got older. The only other contacts with the Kauffman side of the family I remember vaguely was that we got together with the descendents of some of them once at a hotel in Cleveland and once at a lake in northern Indiana. There was a woman among them they called Connie and another, I think, called Laddie, but I don't think I ever saw any of them again.
What Barb discovered, though, really made me feel good, like Alex Haley finding his "Roots." What vexed me was that even though I tried the same genealogy sites she did, I couldn't find them. I have to admit that she's a better genealogist than I am, that she has the ability to follow clues and hunches better than I can. Mine got me nowhere. "Well," she reminds me, "I am a media specialist, after all." Grrr.
I learned also that Nelson, my first name, was a family name, not just given me by my brother after meeting Nelson Rockefeller as family legend always held--my mother, like me, was prone to exaggerate to make a good story-- and that there were many family names in the tree, and variant spellings. Barb's traced us from the farming Mennonites of Ohio back to the old German and Swiss farms of our European ancestors. And the further we go, the more surprises we find, folks we never heard of before.
For me, the curiosity ends with what she's already found. But for her and Scott, who gave her the software for this summer quest, it may go on to Eden. It is surely amazing how many of us there are, and were before us, and how difficult and Byzantine a search it can be to try to find them. There are many sites that charge a fortune for their access, and many government sites full of misinformation. Even some public county and state libraries guard their collections like Fort Knox or won't let you search their records online.
But Barb says women tend to be more concerned about genealogy than men, generally, and she's probably right. I don't know what that means, but I tend to agree. The main thing it has taught me is that I now realize that I am one of many, many people who found themselves on this earth and came to think they were one of a kind. I now realize that yes, I am unique in many ways; but more importantly I am only one of many, many others who comprise the rich, wonderfully diverse human fabric.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Brothers of the Brush, Sisters of the Swish
Barb's working on our geneology now, so I tried to help look up some old names and dates amongst the family albums. I use the term "albums" generically; they're really several big boxes with a few albums of prints, some old cardboard covered unframed portraits, and hundreds of loose photos jammed together without rhyme or reason. But while I rummaged through them, I ran across an old black and white photo that brought back some meaningful memories.
When I was nine, our Indiana hometown celebrated its centenial, and for a small town of only 14,000 or so, they put on quite a show. They hired a New York director to come to our small city for a couple of months and put on a pageant of our history, and the whole community got involved. The centenial celebration actually went on for about three months.
Far ahead of time the menfolk in town were asked not to shave, and contests were organized for the "Brothers of the Brush" who began to sprout everywhere around town to judge the best mustasches, sideburns, and beards. The women in turn were asked to make and wear oldtime costumes and bonnets, judged by others for their creativity and effect as the "Sisters of the Swish." And everyone, nearly, in the city got into the spirit of the thing. And for those few who resisted or tried to ignore the new/old looks, they did so at their peril. Mock trials were set up and conducted on Jefferson street sidewalk by the local circuit court bailiffs, sheriff, and judge, and men were stopped on the street if they were cleanshaven, tried immediately, and asked to serve "time" in mock public ridicule if found guilty (which all were). And if someone wanted to take it to a higher court, a stepladder was produced and the sentence repeated from a higher platform.
Within a few weeks, Huntington began to take on the look of a frontier town. A scripted dramatic history of the city was written. Parts were chosen and assigned to townspeople for the big pageant and parade culminating the celebration at Kriegbaum Field, and my brother, Roger, was excited to be one of the narrators. My dad was chosen to be a canal boat captain, and I was a frontier boy. I still have a picture of Daddy and me in our buckskins Mom made for us. Practises were held for several days beforehand, and it was no mean feat to organize as the cast of hundreds of local folks were put through our paces through the two-hour-plus show.
After a huge parade, in costume of course, the big show was finally produced at night, and it was really spectacular. It went off without a hitch, as I remember, despite the numbers involved and nonprofessional participants. As with school musicals, if you weren't yet "onstage," you were in the audience, and the audience groups were always coming and going to cue up for their scenes. I wish they had today's film and video technology back then, but no visual record of the 1948 pageant exists that I know of. Only newspaper photos and writeups preserve the flavor of those days. It was as if we stepped back in time one hundred years.
But perhaps the shock was greater when the celebration ended, and all the beards came off at one mass shave, and the women shed their 19th century bonnets and long skirts and suddenly began dressing in contemporary fashions. It was as if Brigadoon had disappeared back into the mist for another hundred years. The Brothers of the Brush and the Sisters of the Swish were gone in an instant.
I don't know if such an event would even be possible today. Certainly not in a large city. And it would only happen if people would support it. I'm not sure folks still have that much sense of community now in very many places, and it's kind of a shame I think. We don't know each other's names if we live more than a house or two apart, we interact through third parties of our employers or governments or church groups and clubs, and we have to lock our doors constantly against the rest of the "community" we don't even know. We didn't usually, then.
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