And the Palm Springs pictures are finally up!

New pictures posted here. I should get the Palm Springs stuff up soon (I hope!), so I can concentrate on butterfly and Ren Faire pictures. Whew!

In about 30 minutes I'll board the hotel shuttle to the airport and that will be it for the Great California Adventure of '06. I've learned a lot about this career field I've stumbled into, stood on a high mountain top, seen a great show, eaten some really rich desserts, walked a lot, and am so tired my head is ringing. I want to do this again! The UAWriters' Conference (UA stands for "user assistance," a high-falutin' way of saying we write help manuals) is a yearly event, in various western locales...last year was in Las Vegas, another in San Francisco, and another in Seattle. If I play my cards right, maybe I can get my company to make this a yearly thing for me too.

I met a lady in the hot tub just now who remarked, "Well, I'm flying home from here and going right to a sci-fi con." She's from Seattle; turned out she was going to NorWesCon. I recommened Lois Bujold to her, and she recommended Susan Burg and Matt Ruff to me. The other couple in the hot tub promptly fled when the talk turned to sci-fi, clearly afraid we would morph into Klingons at any moment.

Another technical writer related the following to me today:

I was writing help for a restaurant booking system with a touch screen. So I had to keep saying, "tap such and such, tap the button, tap the area, etc." My boss hated the word "tap." He asked, "Can't we use something else? Can't we say 'click'?" Well, obviously "click" was out, because there was no mouse. So I replaced every instance of the word "tap" with "smite," and send it back to my boss. He agreed that "tap" should stay.

These are my kind of people.

It's so utterly weird to be surrounded by people for whom RoboHelp is a major factor in their lives. Just like me, that is. How strange. All around me I hear snippets of conversation about RoboHelp functions, its future, possible replacements, techniques and workarounds...at tonight's networking mixer, hosted by Adobe, there was an announcement that, "Yes, we WILL be continuing to develop RoboHelp!" This was met with actual *cheers*.

There are no punches being pulled by the competitors, either...Doc2Help's slogan is "Your one-click RoboHelp Replacement." Madcap Flare touts itself as "The RoboHelp Upgrade." It's kind of fun to play them off against each other--I walk up to a demo table and ask, "What can you do for me that AuthorIT can't do?" or, "What do you have to say to Doc2Help's claim that they are the one-click RoboHelp Replacement?" and watch them struggle to justify themselves without dissing the competition too blatantly.

So far I am about 85% sold on AuthorIT, as they are the only ones who have been able to say, "yes, we do that" to just about everything I've asked about, without hemming and hawing about future releases. Also, the reseller I talked to is based in Lawrenceville, GA, so they could come out and do an onsite demo for us. I talked to one of their current users too, who couldn't stop raving about their tech support and how easy it was to organize a project for localization, which is an especially hot topic at Procuri.

Wow, I feel all grownup and professional. This is fun!

The sun going down on Santa Monica Boulevard is overrated, I think. Mainly it seems to involve traffic and road construction.

Hollywood Boulevard is a lot like Dragoncon, except you have to tip everyone you take a picture of, and, frankly, the costumes aren't as good.

Our friend Anne happened to be visiting her parents near Anaheim this weekend (from Singapore, but that's a really long story), so we invited her to come up and see the dead prehistoric animals with us.

The tar pits were a hit. My favorite part was a kiosk entitled, "See what it feels like to be trapped in tar!" Even though I've already been to middle school, I just had to go over and check that out. Turned out to be a bunch of handles attached to big cynlinders, stuck in a bucket of tar under a glass panel. You could pull the handles to experience the sensation of a prehistoric creatur attempting to pull its cylinders out of the tar pits.

I thought the diorama of the family of mammoths was a bit creepy. Daddy and baby mammoths on the shore of the lake watched in horror as mommy mammoth burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp. And countless schoolchildren are made to observe this tragedy every year. Think of the therapy bills later on. For god's sake, think of the children!

According to MapQuest, it's supposed to take about 2 hours to get from Palm Springs to West Hollywood. That might be true if half the route weren't under costruction. We lost so much time in the narrowed-down section of highway that we got into LA just in time for...wait for it...rush hour!

We left Palm Springs at 1:30. We got to my cousins' place at 6 o'clock.

It was nice getting reacquainted with Debbie, and she took us over to the hospital to visit her mom, who will be coming home today. We'll spend some more time with them this evening, after we get back from the tar pits. What else would you want to do on a sunny afternoon in southern California, than go see dead prehistoric animals? Now that's my idea of a good time!

Aaron and I booked our flights separately, since I'm coming back later than he is, and my company is paying for my flight. So we didn't get seats together on either the main flight to Las Vegas or the little bitty toy prop plane to Palm Springs. (It was a bit like that plane they take out to the City of the Dead in "The Mummy," but with room for more passengers.)

But it wasn't just us--the couple I sat down with had been separated too--I had to chase one out of my seat until we could get someone else to switch so they could sit together. There was an empty seat next to me, and I was going to have Aaron move into it, but then the lady assigned to that seat sat down. I asked her if she'd consider switching, and she said, "If you knew what I've been through, you wouldn't even ask."

This poor woman had been travelling with her husband. I say "had been," bc by the time I made her acquaintance, her husband had been left behind in Atlanta with his bag that was too big to carry on. Instead of gate checking it like a normal, sane airline does, they'd made him go back through security to check it at the ticketing counter. So he'd missed the flight. Leaving his poor wife to fly all alone to Las Vegas and wait for him. Since the flight was a late-night one--leaving at 10pm--that meant she wouldn't see him until sometime the next day.

Oh, and if you're keeping track, since she was in the empty aisle seat next to me, she wouldn't have gotten to sit with her husband anyway. What is it with America West that they are so keen to break couples up? Are they worried we all want to join the Mile High Club?