Thoughts of a Traveling Geek
Posts tagged travel
Tales of a Road Warrior
Jul 7th
I’ve spent a lot of time travelling in my career. In fact, I’m a bit ashamed to say that I’ve spent at least one week out of every month on the road for the past five or six years. To put it mildly, I’ve seen a few airports and slept in a few hotels.
This month is no exception to my travel routine. Next week I’ll be travelling to FUDCon in beautiful Santiago, Chile. I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity to return to Santiago and take part in the FUDCon conference there. After that, I’m headed to the FISL conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This will be my second trip to Brazil this year, and another chance to gain weight by drinking too much guaraná soda.
If you’re going to either FUDCon Santiago or FISL, be sure to stop by and say hello. I can’t wait to see you there!
Update:
Sorry for the broken RSS feed — I think I may have triggered a bug in WordPress. It should be fixed now.
Documentation (or the lack thereof)
Jul 23rd
I’m in Seoul, Korea this week teaching one of the ever-popular Asterisk Bootcamp classes. As luck would have it, my hotel room has the most amazing remote control in the world! Not only does it control the big ol’ LCD TV and the DVD player, but it also controls the air conditioner and all the lights in the room (including both lights in the bathroom!)
In trying to actually use the remote control, however, I was given a stark reminder of how important documentation can be. As you probably already know, I try to take an active role in the documentation teams for both Asterisk and the Fedora Project, but never seem to make the time to write as much as I’d like. As such, I can only hope our documentation efforts are more effective than the yellow labels on my remote control — just documenting the bare minimum and forcing the user to experiment to do anything useful (and very likely getting lost in the process).
(It’s my own personal opinion that this is one of the ways that free/open source software often fails to keep up with it’s commercial rivals; Many open source projects can’t afford to hire technical writers, and if they’re lucky enough to have volunteers do the work, there often isn’t much praise for the hard work and effort that goes into it.)
If this reminder has you feeling the same way I am, why not step up to the plate and help out on the documentation front? After all, the fearless leader and the rest of the docs crew needs your help! As the old adage goes… many hands makes light work! We’d be glad to have you join our ranks.
