As promised, a photo of our new house:

Today was an excellent day at the Granger Church IT Roundtable! I’m not sure when/if I’ll have the time to post specific notes, but Brett Anderson has posted three entries of notes already.

I’m still at Granger Community Church, and the Roundtable folks are filtering out now that the pizza is gone. It looks like it’s about time for me to pack up and start the three hour drive home. And then, sleep. Only got about 3.5 hours of that last night, so it’s time to catch up!

Thanks to Brett Anderson I just noticed that Mozy was acquired by EMC! Interesting turn of events, especially considering the very high price they sold for. I’ve never done much with EMC so I guess I’ll get some experience indirectly now at least. I’ve been using Mozy happily for a few months, after working though a couple of issues.

This Wednesday, I’m heading up to Granger, IN to the Granger Community Church Church IT Roundtable. It’s the week before the big one in Kansas City (registration closes today!) and should be a good, smaller group that I’m looking forward to hanging out with for the day. And, although I’m sure I will be sad to go home that evening, I get to look forward to seeing Jason and probably several others at in Kansas City in October!

Jason Powell has asked that GCC Roundtable attendees bring a topics list to discuss, so I have to think of some stuff for that. It’s not coming up with topics that will be a problem, it’s finding the time to actually make a list! Between Roundtables, some website work (sorry, I know I promised a post about this, but I’m too much in the middle of it to write about it yet), moving (spent five hours doing almost-the-last painting today!), and schoolwork (which I need to get ahead on this week so I can have fun at the Roundtables), it’s been and continues to be crazy. At least I’m having fun with just about everything; I just wish I could add hours to the day. But who doesn’t want that? I guess I’ll settle for going to bed right now, rather than at 4:30 like last night :-)

Yep, still All House, All The Time. Which is how it feels in real life, too, not just this blog! We are finally moved completely out of our apartment and into our house. The keys were turned in to the apartment drop box this evening after all the rest of our furniture was moved and the last few boxes (and bags) brought over.

So tonight is the first night we sleep in our house. We’re exhausted, and boxes are everywhere, there is still more work to be done than I can comprehend right now, and I finally got my paper draft turned in for my class about four minutes before the deadline tonight. Tomorrow evening: do homework due Thursday night. Unpack and organize more stuff. Get curtain rods and put up curtains and shades. Sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

Tomorrow during the day: Try to do three days of work in one. Not likely to happen, but I’ll have fun trying. Or I’ll fall asleep trying, which is more likely. Fortunately, my work keyboard is a nice, ergonomic Microsoft Natural keyboard with a big wrist-rest. If I can position myself correctly, my forehead will be cushioned by this when I fall onto it, asleep. Let’s hope.

The Church IT Roundtables at Granger Community Church in Granger, IN on Sept. 26th and at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, MO on Oct. 3-4 are fast approaching, and I’m going to both of them! I’m looking forward to attending them both. No time to link to them both tonight, but if you can’t find them via Google or other Church IT blogs, you don’t deserve to work in Church IT. No, really. Exceptions granted on a case-by-case basis, post your reasons :-)

I’m sitting in our house, on the empty floor in our bedroom. We painted on Saturday and Sunday, about eight hours a day of actual painting, but a lot more than that with everything else factored in. This left no time to actually move much, except the load we took each morning from our apartment to the house in my brother-in-law’s pickup truck, and the load my mom and I made last night from which I got back to the apartment to sleep at after 1 am. My wife had to run to work for a meeting this morning so I watched my son, and then we spent all afternoon trying to figure out why he was crying all the time (nothing seemed to calm him down) and trying to figure out how to get the rest of the big furniture moved by the end of tomorrow.

So, on day two of my unplanned time off tomorrow, the plan is to finish painting the one bathroom that didn’t get painted, and the one ceiling that didn’t get painted. Also to move smaller boxes and prepare the furniture to be moved by some local movers we hired who are coming tomorrow evening. And clean the apartment so we can turn in the keys. And a few other things I’m too tired to remember.

But the exciting thing today? Our phone and DSL internet work! It only took me an hour and a phone call to AT&T to get the DSL functional but it’s up and running and what I’m using to write this. Much more speed and signal strength than the random open access point I had found (shhh!). Still no cable, which is supposed to be in by 5 pm but they only have 20 more minutes and thus confidence is not being exuded.

But the paint looks great (even if my arms will fall off if I attempt to paint another ceiling — that means they’re falling off tomorrow!), and we’re happy to finally have a house. Now, if I can just get my paper written tonight (due tomorrow night) while my wife’s at work and my mom watches my son, I’ll be all set. Until Thursday night when more homework is due that I have not yet begun!

Nope…no pictures yet…you think I’ve had time to download pictures from my camera? I’ve barely had time to take any! (And not many, at that.)

We got this house this morning at 9:30 am finally, and they aren’t charging us interest until today. We also get 1 cent per month cheaper payments…a whole $3.60 if we stay there thirty years! Anyway, been busy at work all day since then, and now I’m about to head out to dinner and more moving and painting stuff. No internet at the house until Monday sometime (if AT&T holds up their end of the deal) so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post a picture, but hopefully very soon!

Well, we went to closing at 3pm today on our new house. Everything started out fine, it took about a half-an-hour to sign all the paperwork, and another 20 minutes to “make copies” before we were told that due to some back-end stuff (everything’s fine on our end) the loan was taking a little longer to “fund” and it apparently has to fund before they can give us the keys. They told us it would close before 5 pm and to run some local errands. I dropped my wife off to feed our son at my in-laws and rushed back at 4:55 pm and they said that the loan now isn’t going to fund until tomorrow morning at 9:30. And no one explained the details of the funding process or even mentioned that there was any possibility we wouldn’t get the keys immediately following closing, until after we signed all the papers and they told us about the problem.

As you might imagine, my wife and I are very frustrated right now, owning a house they won’t give us the keys to. We already took the afternoon off work to go to the closing, and had the entire evening planned including eating our first meal in our new house, moving some boxes, and starting to tape and lay drop-cloths for the painting we are going to do tomorrow and Saturday. Now I have to take additional time off work, drive across town again in the morning, with my wife since apparently there’s a paper we signed a long time ago that’s changed that we both have to re-sign, and then finally get the keys, in time for me to have to back to work for the rest of the day.

Our Realtor may get the keys and paperwork moved to her office, closer to us, in the morning, but we’d have to wait an hour later to do that so we’ll see what happens. It’s just one big, unexpected wrench in the works that we’re very unhappy about. We’ll wait and see how they choose to compensate us for the day’s worth of interest they’re charging us for a house we can’t get into.

In my Technical Writing class, someone brought up the point in the discussion forums that many manuals are either to broad for a novice to comprehend, or too detailed and frustrate experts just looking for a quick reference and trying to skim. I decided to reply with an example showing how a nested list could help provide details for a novice while still being easy to skim for an expert. And, of course, I decided to throw in a touch of ironic humor since I was making up the example anyway. It received a good response, and and thus I pass it on to you as the remainder of this post (some text styles have not carried over from the original example, but I’m not illustrating my point for class here so it doesn’t lose much):

I do think that in some cases, instructions could be improved if they were divided up with different emphasis. So high-level stuff would be large and in one style, with the smaller steps broken down in a smaller area for those that needed them. Most instructions do use a table of contents and/or headings to do something like this, but I think adding levels could in some cases help. For example:

Typing Text in the Eye Dee Ten Tee Program

For ID10Tsnovices or advanced users :-)

• Big Main Heading
  • Creating a document
    1. Push the button
       • First, hold your finger in front of the circle (aka “button”) in the center of the case.
       • Move your hand forward, depressing the circle with said finger until you hear and feel a click.
       • Remove finger from button.
    2. Wait
       • Wait until the screen in front of you has finished turnng on
       • Continue to wait until there are little pictures on the screen.
    3. Open “Eye Dee Ten Tee” program
       • Find the picture (aka “icon”) on the screen in front of you that says “Eye Dee Ten Tee” (this would be a good place for a screenshot)
       • Move the mouse to the picture you found in the previous step.
         • (more inane steps here on how to move the mouse, what is a mouse, etc.)
       • Press the button on the mouse to begin using the said program
         • (more inane steps here on how to click a mouse?)
       • Wait until you see a blank white area on the screen with text at the top saying “ID10T” with a blinking cursor below that text.
    4. Type your text
       • Move your hands to the keyboard so your left index finger rests on the “F” key and your right index finger rests on the “J” key
       • Make sure your other fingers rest on the keys they naturally line up with in this position.
       • Move your fingers so one finger at a time depresses the key corresponding to the next letter in succession of the word(s) you desire to display on the screen.
    5. Print the text
       • (lots more steps here to print the text so the user doesn’t have to save the document somewhere that they would forget anyway becuase you haven’t explained directory structures yet)
  • More high-level steps here

I could continue ad nauseum, but I hope you get the idea already, and I think I’ve had way too much fun with my little demonstration exercise :-D Basically, more advanced users use the numbered steps and ignore the substeps, while novices can go at a slower pace with the detailed steps. And the occasional advanced user can refer to the detailed instructions when they get lost. Note the use of bold style and font sizes (i reserved italics for editorial comments, in this case) to visually separate the varying levels of steps to make this easier. Also note the lack of visual aids becuase I’ve already spent way too much time making this silly example to bother with graphics.

(Disclaimer: My instructions above are not complete and there are several obvious glaring holes where more steps need to be added to remain consistent with the level of detail provided. But unless I can get credit for this as my manual, it’s not worth the time nor the effort!)

(Warning: The above instructions are for entertainment purposes only and I disclaim any and all liability arising from the use or misuse of the above instructions regardless of the intentions of the user, or the orientation of the moon in relation to the earth and sun.)

(Warning: This example also serves as an example of a procrastination technique for avoiding credit-bearing projects. Doing the same is not recommended. You should really do the school work itself and turn it in early. But IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) and you should consult your own and not consider this a legal opinion in any way, shape, form, or point of fact.)

Trent at The Simple Dollar has an excellent review of the book On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It’s a book I need to read again; I’ve read part of it but had forgotten about it until I saw this review. It has inspired a desire to re-read the book. If I recall correctly, it is long but not dry at all. It’s actually very interesting and fun to read. Which is not surprising; given the title, this book not written well would hardly be credible! Remembering back to when I read part of this book, the thing that stood out the most to me (which Trent also mentions) was “less is more.” Write a wordy sentence if you must, but go back and rip out anything unnecessary. I could use a healthy dose of that!

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I did our final inspection of the house that we are building. The last few things are being fixed by tomorrow, and we close later this week! This will be a busy weekend but I am looking very much forward to being out of our apartment! I haven’t posted much about the house building process (just once at the beginning and once when they framed it, and I never even posted pictures!) here but it has been an exciting six months.

I promise I will post at least a picture of the front very soon, after we close (and maybe after we paint/move, because that’s going to keep me busy!). It’s a very modest size house but we love it. It has four bedrooms (smaller rooms with the square footage of many three bedroom houses) and will give me the opportunity to have a home office while still giving us room for family expansion (not that those plans are concrete in any general direction yet). Because we built it (through Beazer), we got to select the design options and all that fun stuff (the floor plan was selected very much by price), and watching it come together has been very cool. And all the options actually look good together, so credit to my wife there! :-) But, by building, we also subjected ourselves to a six month wait that is finally nearing its end. It’s been a long six months!

We’ve been blessed to work with some great Beazer people at our particular community. Through observation it appears most of the Beazer folks we have worked with day-to-day are fellow Christians, and they are also good people doing good work that I am very impressed by. Our Realtor even said at the inspection that the minor cosmetic fixes needed were far less than she’s seen on many new homes, so they put a lot of work and care into this thing. I can’t speak for Beazer as a company as much as these specific people we have worked with, but I am very impressed with them. It feels like we have a relationship with them, and we’re not just customers. And that makes a huge difference to me in any transaction.