The Golden 80s

It is a fact that albums released by Joe Satriani are good. Or no albums by this virtuoso guitarist is bad. The latest album, Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards , is simply perfect, melodious, and technically excellent. Right from Premonition, through keyboard laden Pyrrhic Victoria, bluesy Littleworth Lane, rocking Light Years Away, and The Golden Room with an Indian sound, the album is a listener's pleasure. Like all his previous albums, the songs are simply beautiful, but more world music oriented stuff with a tinge of dance music thrown in the right measure. The album is an intelligent shift towards international music, and drifts away from the 80s harder and heavier sound. If I compare Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards with his previous stuff such as Surfing With The Alien, Flying In A Blue Dream, and The Extremist, then I feel disappointed. Gone are the lighting fast solos, power chords, and exploding riffs. Satch is no more a metal-friendly act. He has abandoned the "m...

Is it Walk in, Walk In, or walk-in? The word, walk-in , appears as a noun and an adjective in Merriam Webster online .  I could not find the word without the hyphen. The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary website showed the hyphenated word only. As you know, the word means someone who walks in to a place without an appointment. Typical examples are walk-in customers for a bank, walk-in interviews for fresh graduates, and walk-in patients in a hospital.

As technical writers, most of us get a chance to review documents prepared by colleagues or writers from other teams. While a few may be reluctant to do reviews, it is a fact that the reviews provide technical writers with an opportunity to participate in the quality control process of user and technical documentation. If the team has a technical editor, he or she may be left with enough time to do a thorough review of documents. A process will be in place to plan and complete editing. If one of the team members take up the taks of editing, the edits mostly will be a mix of “copy-editing” and “technical editing". A“production edit” can also be done on the draft versions of the PDFs created to ensure that everything is all right before it is send to the customer. The limiting factor indeed is time. The first step in editing is to read the entire document once. It is indeed a quick read just to get an idea of what is it all about. Such a reading does give me a...

How different is copy editing from the editing you do as part of your technical writing? Some might feel that it is nothing compared to what is done in technical writing. Others might say a lot can be carried from newspaper copy editing to technical editing. Others might say both are miles apart. I can't help from saying that there is an awful lot of misunderstanding about a copy editor's work in newspapers. On the internet, one of the best quoted or linked source of what a copy editor does is at The Slot. Click here to read The Slot's article on What Exactly is a Copy Editor .  Here, I don't intend to pass judgements on which one is more challenging and complex, or which one is easy. Let me put my perspective what a copy editor (sub editor in Indian parlance) does. Firstly, it is neither a "mere" editing job, nor a proofreading job. It is job with lots of responsibility, pressure, and requires syncing with the editorial team, the reporting team, the grap...

One of the words that technical communicators should have in their vocabulary is Engage. Because the word also means to "become involved." In reality, many technical writers refuse to get "actively" involved with the project teams and refuse to accept responsibility for mistakes on their part. A few even consider themselves as "individual contributors" in a team. Technical writers cannot sit before the desktops and imagine that everything—information, reference documents, software build, and so on—will reach them automatically. They cannot simply shift the blame for incorrect information or missing information in their documents to someone else. For technical writers of any level, engaging themselves with the project team is the most crucial aspect. This may require lots of legwork, casual chat, and intent to even befriend a few team members. The primary benefit of such an interaction is more or less complete documentation of the software and feature...