So you work at a big hi-tech company and you have questions. Lots of questions. But your manager is in yet another meeting and your deadline is looming. Who do you turn to? Why, your friendly, neighbourhood technical writer of course. Here’s why:

1.       Your technical writer may have written a 500 page manual on how your product works but you sure don’t have time to read that beast. Why not ask the author directly? Your technical writer probably knows more about the product than anyone else at the company.

2.       Who is constantly interviewing marketing and upper management for the latest product definitions and behaviour? Not you.

3.       When Quality Assurance finds a bug they don’t cross-check your code, they check out the documentation. Guess who wrote the documentation.

4.       Does your product spec give little insight into the user interface? Your technical writer thinks like a user. They do not think like you. Trust me on this.

5.       Or maybe you have a really great idea for a product improvement but the thought of writing a proposal to the decision makers puts you off as much as writing an essay in English class did. Technical writers love writing essays. In fact, if they’re on-board with your idea you cannot find a better advocate.

There were many naysayers when this “magical device” first came out. It’s nothing but a glorified iPod Touch they cried. No front-facing camera. No multitasking (until the Fall that is, when iPhone OS 4 comes out). No USB ports, and so on.

Well I’m not one of those nitpicking technocrats. I think that the iPad is like a shiny piece of the future, straight out of Star Trek. It’s amazing. But here’s the thing: I don’t even own a laptop. Never have. I own a Desktop computer – gasp – built piece by piece from scratch in the dirty streets of the Yongsan electronics market in Seoul, South Korea. That was six years ago. I’m not exactly an early adopter.

These days, however, I’ve been thinking of switching to a laptop. Sadly I won’t be able to build it myself. But at least I’ll catch up to the crowd. Maybe ten years from now, iPads will be as ubiquitous as laptops are today. If so, I may think about picking one up for myself.

To be working on a project that is. At least it feels that way considering most writing projects I’ve been involved in are over after a hair-pulling night of throwing words onto a page or two. Project timelines are a bit more distended in the technical writing world. But, anyway, enough kerfuffle. What I’d like to present to you is the best business phone ever.

Yes, it’s the phone system I’ve been writing those 400-page Internal Product Specifications for. Synapse is basically a VoIP-based telephony network that integrates into an existing LAN network. What this means is that you don’t have to buy fifty phone lines because it runs over the internet. I won’t bore you with the details, so why don’t you take a look at a promo video cooked up by the AT&T marketing guys (Quicktime). BTW, I also worked on the text in the User Interface (the display) and I can honestly say that this is the most user-friendly business phone you’ll ever use.

As 2010 hits in full force I’m thinking of ways to schedule in more quality blog time and keep wordbit alive. In the meantime, here is my latest article on how to avoid cold and flu germs. I don’t know about you but I’ve run the germ gambit from Swine to March Madness varieties and I’ve had enough. So it’s apt then that my article recommends borderline conspiracy theory-fueled paranoid behaviour to avoid catching a sniffle.

This year has been busy and exciting and just plain exhausting. But I’ve finally found some time to upload a bunch of the articles that I’ve had published this year for alive and blush magazines. The majority focus on green issues. I’ve been somewhat typecast as the devil’s green advocate, being asked to find flaws in all manner of righteous green concepts. To read one, click on the image.

Baby’s nontoxic nursery: Preparing a healthy space for your newborn. What paints should you choose when decorating baby’s new room? Surrounding your new child with noxious fumes is the last thing you want to do.

Lawn warfare: Pesticide and herbicide use in Canada. I interviewed the PR person from the David Suzuki Foundation as well as a professor of biomolecular chemistry to write this one.

Get in the habit: 10 easy ways to shrink your carbon footprint. This one is self explanatory. But did you know the concept for a carbon footprint was derived from those newfangled desktops in the early 90s that stood upright instead of lying flat?

In it for the money: Green initiatives that are good for our ecology economy. This is one of those slightly cynical pieces. The intro comes from a really funny ad for IBM that you can watch here on Youtube. The art department did an awesome job with this one.

The eco dilemma: Why electric cars won’t save the world. Once again, an alternative look at a green deus ex machina (a term, incidentally, that I had originally used in the intro – but my editor wisely replaced this rather academic term with “save the day”).

Selenium and cancer: Good news and bad. A short piece on the links between cancer and an antioxidant called selenium.

Two very short pieces: Cleaning our lakes – about a government restriction of phosphates, and When TVs die – about the switchover from analog to digital and the potential aftermath of discarded TVs in our landfills.