Ask MetaFilter posts by nebulawindphone

What's your tech writing bible?

nebulawindphone — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:15:39 -0800

What's your tech writing bible? So I'm writing a tutorial for a bit of software.

When it comes to the WHAT and WHY of it, I'm all set — it's a tool for researchers in my field, so I could go on for hours about the ideas behind it. But the HOW is proving tricky for me. Listing the steps to follow to do X, or describing what button Y does, or explaining how to find Z in the output, just leaves me incoherent.

I'm looking for a good book (or website?) on technical writing that will explain how to write well about this stuff. I'm a writer first and a techie second, if that matters, and I don't mind spending some time reading — I'd prefer something solid and comprehensive to a Fifteen Minute Guide For Dummies. Suggestions?

How do you get work done when life's got you down?

nebulawindphone — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:21:11 -0800

Life kicked me in the teeth, but I've got work to do. I don't need anyone to cheer me up, I'm just looking for a specific bit of advice: how do you get things done when you're depressed? About a week ago, my dream job pretty much landed in my lap. It's going to mean a lot of independent research and writing, with maybe a once-weekly meeting with a supervisor. I'm confident that on a good day I could rise to the challenge and kick some serious ass.

Thing is, this isn't a good day. My wife left me two weeks ago, and I'm putting the pieces back together, but I'm still all sad and sluggish. I can't think straight; simple goals seem impossible; the smallest setback sends me back to the couch.

I know I'll feel better with time — and I've got lots of help in that department, friends and family and so on. But I'm not about to feel better tomorrow, and I need to get to work. What I'm looking for is advice on getting the job done when your heart isn't in it. Thoughts?

Writing a (non-academic) resume for a perpetual student?

nebulawindphone — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:49:36 -0800

Writing a (non-academic) resume for a perpetual student? I'm a first-year Ph.D. student. I am, if I do say so myself, pretty damn good at it, and it's taken loads of hard work, responsibility and professionalism to get me here.

The flip side is that my resume is a complete train wreck. My work history sort of fills in the cracks in the academic calendar: summer jobs, seasonal jobs, temp jobs, part-time jobs. My TAship this year has been the only position I've ever held longer than six months. I've never stuck around anywhere long enough to get promoted.

Anyway, it's time to get a summer job again, and I'm sick of the skeptical looks, unreturned phone calls and negative assumptions. I may not qualify for anything fancy, but I know I'm good enough to run the copier and answer the phones for the summer, and I'm sick of having a resume that doesn't reflect that fact.

What can I do to make it clear that I'm a hard-working perpetual student, and not an unemployable drifter, in the ten seconds before my resume's tossed into the trash?

When do a bunch of characters solve a problem in one long conversation?

nebulawindphone — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:18:20 -0800

I'm looking for dialog-heavy scenes (in books, movies, TV shows, etc) where a group of people solve a problem or make a plan in the course of one long conversation. The "one long conversation" criterion is what makes this hard. Most police procedurals, for instance, don't work because the problem-solving is spread out across many short conversations in the course of an episode. The planning in heist movies tends to be the same way — split up, or scattered through some sort of "preparation" montage. I want examples where you get to watch the whole problem-solving process from beginning to end, with one set of participants, no jumps forward or backward in time, and no interruptions.

Bonus points, too, if the problem involves subgoals (e.g. "To get the money we'll need to break into the building, get past the guards, and open the safe. Now let's think about how to break into the building....")

Lest this sound too chatfiltery, there is a practical problem here: I'm doing research on the linguistic structure of conversations, and I'd like some well-known examples of this kind of conversation that I can point to as examples.

Help me turn this MIME attachment into something decipherable

nebulawindphone — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 09:39:16 -0800

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64? Content-Type: application/applefile? Help me turn this MIME attachment into something decipherable. I was sent an important form as an email attachment with no three-letter extension. I opened it with a text editor, hoping to find some readable text among the gibberish, and saw the following:

--Apple-Mail-29-607603874

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Content-Type: application/applefile;

        name=Financial Aid Recs 2008-09.doc

Content-Disposition: attachment;

        filename="Financial Aid Recs 2008-09.doc"



AAUWBwACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMAAAAJAAAAPgAAAAoAAAADAAAASAAAAB4AAAACAAAA

ZgAAAT5XOEJOTVNXRAAQRmluYW5jaWFsIEFpZCBSZWNzIDIwMDgtMDkuZG9jAAABAAAAAQwAAAAM

AAAAMgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgHU1AgVXNlcgAAAQAAAAEMAAAADAAAADIAf+pAAQQAgAAcADIA

AFNUUiAAAAAKv+P//wAAAAAAfyUw



--Apple-Mail-29-607603874

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Content-Type: application/octet-stream;

        x-mac-creator=4D535744;

        x-unix-mode=0644;

        x-mac-hide-extension=yes;

        x-mac-type=5738424E;

        name=Financial Aid Recs 2008-09.doc

Content-Disposition: attachment;

        filename="Financial Aid Recs 2008-09.doc"



0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAKQAAAAAAAAAA

EAAAKwAAAAEAAAD+////AAAAACgAAAD/////////////////////////////////////////////

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////



...many lines of gibberish skipped -- no readable text anywhere...



AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=



--Apple-Mail-29-607603874--

Renaming it as a .doc file and opening it with OpenOffice, I saw... exactly the same thing, still with no readable text.

What is this file? How can I turn it into something intelligible?

Are there recipes where using very fresh eggs makes an especially big difference?

nebulawindphone — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:49:55 -0800

Of all the recipes that call for eggs, which are improved the most by using very fresh ones? Someone who keeps chickens recently gave us 18 eggs straight out of the bird. They're beautiful, and I'm excited about eating them, but it seems like a shame just to scramble 'em or something — we can do that with eggs from the supermarket and they turn out fine. Are there recipes where having very fresh eggs makes an especially big difference?

What makes for good research?

nebulawindphone — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:35:26 -0800

What makes for good research? I'm looking for books, essays, blogs or personal anecdotes on pretty much any aspect of the question. I'm interested in everything from philosophy ("What makes a question worth answering?") through methodology and on down to the super-practical ("How do you keep your notes organized?").

I'm a first-year grad student in linguistics, so ideas from linguistics, cog sci and anthropology are especially interesting. But stuff from any field and geared towards any audience would be great. I follow thelastpsychiatrist.com, for instance, even though I'll never be doing anything like the clinical research he writes about, just because he's so opinionated on how it should be done.

Long story short, I want to expose myself to as many points of view as I can on the subject. Where should I look that I might not have considered?

So what's the current scoop on Linux on a laptop?

nebulawindphone — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:25:42 -0800

It's that Linux/laptop question again. Desperate geek seeks cheap, durable gear. I've read back through the archives, but things change quickly and many of the relevant posts are a few years old.

I need to replace my old laptop on short notice and a small budget. I've always owned macs, but I simply can't afford one now, and I've become fond enough of the UNIX-style command line that I can't imagine switching to Windows. I'll be using it to write code, work with small audio files (I'm a linguistics student), run LaTeX and browse the web. Provided it can do all those things, my biggest priorities are batshit low price (<$700 would be ideal) and durability.

The immediate question is, what hardware? Are Thinkpads still a good choice for this now that Lenovo's making 'em? (Is it worth trying to track down a pre-Lenovo one?) What other manufacturers make cheap, solid, reasonably Linux-friendly machines? Should I still expect the problems with hibernation and wireless that I read about a few years back?

For that matter, I'll need to settle on a distribution. That's not as big a deal — the hardware's the pressing problem, and the nice thing about a free OS is you can't have buyer's remorse over it. But if you've got a strong opinion on which distros work best on a laptop, or if the choice of distros makes a big difference on a specific machine you're recommending, I'd love to hear about it.

How to learn about the platforms of US political candidates.

nebulawindphone — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:22:58 -0800

US Politics: how do you get information about the actual platforms of the candidates in a race? All I see is blather about their poll numbers and haircuts. I generally read the NY Times for news, but I'm fed up with their political coverage. It's all about image — who needs to impress who, who's attacking who over what — and I just don't care. I want intelligent discussion of the issues and the candidates' stances on them.

Political blogs, the few that I've tried to follow, have been even worse on that count. They've had lots of minutiae on the squabbles between candidates — who was lying when they accused who of concealing what kind of support for which organization that had ties to who when — but very little of the big picture, and very little talk of anyone's actual position. Plus, most of them are shamelessly partisan, which is a problem as far as I'm concerned: if I'm reading about, say, Giuliani, I want to know what he actually stands for, and not what a Ron Paul supporter would caricature him as standing for.

What I'm looking for is a discussion of the candidates' actual platforms, ideally with some historical context and analysis from people who understand this stuff. I don't care about anyone's image, ad budget, poll numbers, "momentum," wardrobe, hairstyle, or choice of pets.

As far as specific issues go, I'm interested in your pretty typical lefty stuff: energy and the environment, civil liberties, foreign policy, health care. But I also don't mind reading about other issues. If one of the candidates has a brilliant idea on how to deal with, I dunno, mortgages or diabetes or steel tariffs, I'd be happy to read a good explanation of what it is and why it matters.

Tips on cooking or brewing with hot peppers.

nebulawindphone — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:26:45 -0800

Tell me about cooking (or better yet, brewing) with hot peppers. I'm looking to make a batch of ancho chili mead. I'd like it to have as much of the fruity ancho flavor as possible, and as little heat or bitterness — I know that some heat is inevitable, but I want this stuff to be drinkable for ordinary humans and not just rabid chili-heads, so I'm aiming for a nice warm tingle and not a vicious burn.

Cooks: How do you maximize the flavor, and minimize the heat, when cooking with hot peppers? Methods involving fat (steeping in oil, frying) aren't really an option here. Anything involving water, sugar, honey or alcohol is ideal.

Homebrewers: Have you ever brewed with hot peppers? Did you add them to the boil, in primary, in secondary, to the bottle, or what? How'd it turn out? What did you learn?