Photo: Iman Moradi

Every few weeks I seem to see clusters of discussions about "young people" and technology. Typically, it starts off as I notice someone doing a news story or just spouting off in a restaurant about how amazing it is that "kids today" are growing up with computers/cellphones/iPods and how amazed they are by how adept and sophisticated they are in using those devices.

Nearly always, within 1-2 days, I see another article or just happen to see an incident that points to just how wrong that generalization is. From computers ripe with thousands of viruses and bits of spyware to reports of college professors citing how poorly students grasp the very concept of citing sources and the simple basics of research, examples seem to point to a much more complicated picture.

It's clear to me that there seems to be a segment inside EVERY age group that seems to just "get" technology. Many of the sharpest technologists I know are in their 50's or 60's and some of the most clueless are 16-25. Of course, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but there certainly seems to be enough indication that the full spectrum from tech novice to tech genius exists in nearly all of the age brackets.

One of the criticisms leveled at the non-savvy portion of the younger brackets is how often they will pretty much stop at the first level of Wikipedia when researching a topic. It's so common that many colleges and Universities have had to put actual bans on citing Wikipedia in academic papers.

Given that I was told that the encyclopedia stopped being a valid primary source at some time in 8th grade, this troubles me like it does many others. Wikipedia and Google are starting points for exploring or researching a topic.

I've mentioned before how often I've been asked how/why I know something. That's been followed more than a few times by people asking how I manage to learn as much as I do about the topics that sparked the discussion in the first place.

As I recently used my "normal" process just recently on a topic, I took note of how I dig into a topic and I thought I'd share. This isn't an approach to writing a formal paper/thesis/dissertation. Rather, it's an approach to to satisfying curiosity, getting acquainted with a topic, and getting a dedicated hobbiest level of knowledge in a given topic.

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Photo: lui

[[FYI, this has been sitting in my writing queue for a while. I took a quick look at it and am shoving it out the door. Let me know if it's deficient and I'll fix it. Consider this version 1.0 of the article.]]

Ever since I spent my time in the technical writing trenches right out of college, I've been interested in doing my writing in a single format, generating whatever target formats from that.

At different points over the ensuing years, I've been drawn to Docbook as that single format. It's SGML/XML, first of all, which makes it relatively easy to write in a text editor. It uses XSLT to transform to other formats. It has pre-built toolchains for outputting HTML, PDF, etc. Also, it is easily versioned using Subversion.

As an additional vote of confidence for using Docbook is the fact that O'Reilly has been using it for many of their recent books. They're actually also storing their content in an Atom Publishing Protocol repository. That's another vote for where my intuition about a personal publishing stack has been leading. When written content is stored in a robust container (DocBook or Atom, etc.), you can repurpose it.

Technical documentation doesn't always work in every format (which is why many of the single source experiments in that space failed). However, for things that *do* work in multiple formats, the technology for producing those formats gets in the way. Not so with DocBook.

Now, while I've looked into it at several different points, I've never really dug into it well enough to get much done with it. I set out over the last couple of weeks to actually get completely up and running with Docbook. This time I powered through and got it working. I suspect that the motivations were more concrete this time

Along the way, I discovered that there wasn't a tutorial that matched what I was looking for. I also found tutorials that had non-functional code. However, despite that, I was able to get a basic Docbook book up and running and figured out a much simpler way to get started with Docbook, so I figured I'd share.
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Photo: raemin Zhang

I'm reading a lot over the last couple of weeks about the memoir as a form of writing. While I'm not planning on writing one myself, there is a reason behind this newfound interest: my project Rememoir. That's the thing I mentioned a few days ago as a project I'm excited about. I'm doing a lot of reading about them because the project is centered around helping people write and publish their memoirs.

I think it will be interesting technologically, but will be even more interesting from a "story" perspective. Creating a place for people to specifically share their personal story intrigues me. I really like the idea of helping people through that process. I think it's that whole combination that has me excited about the project.

One of the things I've been reading to have a better understanding of memoirs and what makes them tick is "Inventing the Truth", edited by William Zinsser. I've only just started it, but the intro essay is triggering lots of colliding thoughts.

2 topics are mentioned in that intro essay are things that have been recurring themes in my life. One of those is the nature of truth, especially how it relates to memory. Zinsser talks about the respective reactions he and his mother had to his writing about his childhood. He wrote it and remembered it as being a lonely childhood, which surprised and saddened his mother, who remembered his childhood as being positive and happy.

He wonders about which vision of his past is infused with more truth. Did his mother just not notice his loneliness or has his memory blown it out of proportion? In my own life, I've become aware of this exact thing. Memories that I remember painfully because of the activity involved are cherished by my dad because they were with me.

Even thinking about some of those now grabs at my heart. I tears me up that my memory and sharing it could actually disturb some of his favorite memories. At the same time, there are some of my most treasured memories that I've found are either completely unknown to my parents or that I've clearly remembered them in a much better light than they actually happened.

I'm intrigued by this whole mess and how the importance of those memories to us affects and determines just how true they are. One of the passages from "The Things They Carried" is that the some of the truest stories never happened and there's some stuff that happened that's not true.

A true story that never happened is a grenade landing on the ground and a guy jumps on it and dies saving his buddies. That's a true story. What really happened is that the guy jumped on the grenade and they all died anyway.

What that says about truth is complicated and hard to articulate, but resonant nonetheless.

The other topic that jumped out at me was Zinsser's description of humor as the "universal solvent". That is a great turn of phrase to describe how I feel about humor. It does act as a solvent, dissolving tensions, fear, unease, etc. That kind of humor has been a constant part of my life as a method of dealing with pain and frustration, showing up in some fairly dark humor. People close to me can attest that the bigger the tragedy or pain, the more likely I am to use humor to deal with it.

I'm not alone. That's pretty much the culture of my family and probably one of the reasons I like dark humor as a tension release in really tense moments in movies. It just works.

All of this has me in a reflective state. I'm not planning on writing a memoir, but thinking about helping other people do just that, you can't help but think about the important moments in your own life and how you'd characterize them. How many of my memories are true, how many actually happened, how many of the painful moments were punctuated with humor and how many remain stark and without the dissolving power of a good laugh.

Yesterday, Shelly left for Cedar Rapids to spend some time with her extended family and attend her cousin's graduation, which leaves just me and the dogs to hold down the fort this weekend.

I'm a Myers-Briggs introvert. Lots of people are surprised by that because I'm loud and enjoy talking. However, much of the reading I've done on the difference is more about whether being with other people recharges or drains you.

I'm married to an extrovert (we balance each other well). When we go out and spend time with 10-12 friends, she comes home energized and talking about it. I need some time alone to recharge.

At any rate, that means that, while I would never volunteer to spend *all* of my time alone, a weekend here and there is just what the doctor ordered. So, it's me, the home theater, the grill and my laptop and maybe a meal with a friend until Sunday night.

I'm working on a CakePHP project that holds some promise as a commercial product/service. It combines 2 of the things I love: writing and technology. It also targets a potentially lucrative target market: retiring baby boomers. It has no real start up costs other than time building the software and writing the content and the results of the service would be a net gain society (do no evil). I really think this could work.

This is not a billion dollar idea or even necessarily a million dollar idea, but then again, a mere extra $215,000 over the next 10 years would pay off my house. An extra $5000 a year would mean a fabulous vacation. An extra $10,000 a year could mean taking a couple of months off.

The last time I took a stab at the product/service market directly, I was too focused on trying to make a $60,000+ living out of the idea. As a result, a product that was making $30,000/year was a "failure". This time around, I'm not going to do that. I *never* want this thing to be my fulltime job. Just think of the difference between winning $10,000 in the lottery this year and making $10,000 this year as your job. One feels like a lot of money, the other is poverty.

I'm holding back the details of the project itself until I'm a little further along, but I'm really excited about this particular project. If you want to know more about it, send me an email or talk to me offline.

As I've been putting together slides to spark discussion on Saturday for the RESTful web development session at MinneBar, I've been going back through a bunch of my bookmarks related to giving presentations, writing and communication.

In those links was a set of video clips from Ira Glass. For those who don't know, Ira Glass is the guy behind the radio show, This American Life, which has recently branched out into TV on Showtime with the same approach.

Both shows are all about telling compelling stories. After you've listened to or watched a few episodes, you'll likely experience the surreal disconnect of finding yourself amazed that you're so interested in a story that *shouldn't* be that interesting. Recently, someone sat down with Ira Glass and asked him the right questions, to get him to explain, in some GREAT detail, what it is that makes for that compelling storytelling experience.

While I definitely have a LONG way to go to integrate the principles he describes, these 4 video clips are something everyone who produces creative or communication content needs to watch. The things he says, resonate and match up really well with my experience.

I especially liked his discussion of the gap between taste and your skills. That's one of the things that's kept me from getting back to working on the podcast. He's right, though, that you just have to power through until that gap closes. I'm thinking I may need to retool the podcast a bit after the conference and see if I can get that thing back on track.

At any rate, give these a look. You won't regret it.

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