Michael Badger

Scratch team members Mitch Resnick and Karen Brennan talk about Scratch Day 2009. Mitch says Scratch provides tools and opportunities for people to express themselves creatively and approximately one new project is uploaded to the Scratch website every minute.

Watch video.

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The Packt author site has an ebook survey posted. The question that catches my attention is: "How interesting would each of these eBook services be to you if we offered them at packtpub.com?"

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The Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference will take place on October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg, PA. They're currently accepting presentation proposals for talks until July 10.

Last year's event offered a nice range of topics. After listening to Eric Smith's Hardware and Honeybees presentation, I decided to take up beekeeping. In truth, I was already mildly interested, but geeked up honey appealed to me.

Drop me a note if you want to assemble a group from the Williamsport/Lewisburg area to attend the conference.

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Do you need to teach your students, your children, or yourself how to program, design, and think critically? Then I've got the book you didn't know you were waiting for.

Today, Packt announced the availability of Scratch 1.3 Beginner's Guide, which is my book. In this book, you will learn to:.

• Create interactive stories, games, and multimedia projects that you can reuse
  
• Learn computer programming basics – no computer science degree required
• Connect with the Scratch community for inspiration, advice, and collaboration
• Provides hands-on projects that help you learn by experiment and play

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Teach your kids how to program games and interactive stories the drag and drop way using the Scratch programming language. From the Scratch Day website:

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Do you work overtime to strip the personal connection from your writing? Do you believe those English teachers who told you serious writing was written in the third person? Here's what Packt editor David Barnes has to say about you:

One of the greatest crimes of the technical writing orthodoxy is to discourage use of the word “you”. It is almost impossible to read a sentence with the words “you” or “your” in it and not be just a little bit interested. So working to avoid them is like going out of your way to bore your readers.

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Technical writers employ various formatting tricks such as headings and lists to quickly help our users find and understand information. But what happens to our writing when we're forced to build our writing around a prescribed structure?

The beginner's guide series from Packt uses a structure to move the reader through each chapter and throughout the book:

Do - Explain - Reflect - Experiment

This structure keeps the writer focused on writing activity-based tutorials, not online help. The reader gets a consistent delivery, and the headings alert the reader to the type of content they expect in any given section. Packt gets a branded book series because they label the sections as Time for action, What just happened, and Have a go hero - consistency helps everyone.

When I first saw the structure of the beginner's guides, I admired the attempt to structure a book in what is essentially a template. As I started writing, my admiration turned to dread, and I was more focused on the getting the structure just right. More importantly, I was trying to figure out exactly what each prescribed section was supposed to achieve. In other words, it was new to me; I wasn't very good at it.

Give this a try: Find a poetic form such as a haiku or villanelle and write to its form. If you're not used to these poetic forms, you'll find the rules first intrigue, then consume your writing.

Effortless

Work with the structure long enough and the "rules" fade into the background, and they begin to guide the writing rather than obstruct it. It's the magical time when the structure inspires our writing, opposed to being a framework we shove our words into. There's a difference, and when you find that moment, you'll know it. The writing becomes effortless.

You begin to establish patterns, break the structure when it makes sense, and start thinking about how you should rewrite the first three chapters.

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I've been editing lots of product copy that was originally written by engineers and further "tweaked" by marketers (the non-writing kind). The engineer speak is a topic for later, but the marketing speak goes like this:

"Blah, blah, blah... the best company in the world... blah, blah, blah."

Of course, there's lots of variations to this: innovative, global leader, industry-leading, world class, most popular news network in the world, super duper, awesome, and many other superfluous, self-serving phrases that actually take value away from your sentence.

The problem, of course, is that it's easy let these words creep into our writing when we have nothing to say, but we write something anyway. We make stuff up because that's what we think we should do.

When you edit your writing, strike the ego and let your readers determine if you are the best. You don't need to bestow that honor upon yourself, your company, or your product. Chances are it's a lie, anyway.

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Got an email from a job seeker last week that read something like this:

It's true that this person did send me the same email in January and I didn't reply. That's because I didn't know who he was then either.

Either we've never met and he's trying to trick me into thinking we have, or I've forgotten our meeting. Oddly enough, the other project managers didn't recognize talking to this person, so I'm left to draw my own conclusions

I take the bait.

So I reply to my mysterious job seeker and say, Hi Rabid (a fictitious name)*, I can't remember how we know each other. Did I interview you? And can you send me a resume? That's been a week ago, so I don't expect to hear from Rabid again.

It's too bad. If I would have gotten a timely response to clarify the misunderstanding, I would have engaged Rabid in a conversation.

The better way to follow up, especially if months have elapsed would be a simple email that said something like this: Hi, My name is Rabid: We last talked on December 1 or I'm inquiring about openings. I can do <list of 3 things>. Here's my resume. Hope to hear from you.

*Rabid is a name I used to protect the guilty. Though you might be interested to know that I wanted to name my son Rabid. Think about it.

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We all know that the first step to meeting a deadline is to start writing, start coding, start designing ... just start. Getting started, however, sometimes requires more effort than thinking about it.

When I'm sitting at my desk backspacing as much as I type, I've developed a few tricks to settle down and make some progress.

• Type all the chapter headlines - Writing a full page of headlines means you only have 29 more pages to write in a 30 page chapter.
  
• Skip the introductions - Write about a specific points. Starting with the introduction is almost always the wrong way to start - at least for me.
• Rewrite the same sentence - Often, I get stuck on a single thought, so I'll write it several different ways and use white space to separate the sentences. Eventually, I'll write something different. 
• Write something different - like a blog post.
  

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