Blogs

I was unfortunately not feeling very well Monday morning so I didn't go in to intern. I would have been practically useless with the raging headache and nausea so I took that day to sleep in. Wednesday I was back and both of my remaining days this week were spent working on the Circle Michigan resource guide for 2009.

My last week as an intern. I took Wednesday off to pick my family up from the airport. The rest of the week was spent finishing up the radial toolbar documentation. This included having it peer reviewed and edited, as well as making changes after each. I also did a little side project for the usability group. They had me document the changes in the user interface (menus, toolbars) that happened from the last release to the current one.

Another eventful week. I was once again given more responsibility and I think I'm glad! Serendipity also publishes a yearly travel resource guide for Circle Michigan. Every year they fill the guide with ads and a few features. The first feature is a piece on Michigan as a whole. Then the next five features each focus on a different region of the state. (Upper Peninsula, Northeast, Northwest, etc.) Well... I have been given the task of writing all of the features for the 2009 edition. Yikes! But, I'm very excited about it. I'm taking it as a sign that Matt has faith in my work.

Last week was pretty eventful. Matt gave me some time on Monday to work on my feature article, then gave me a new assignment. There was a feature article for the upcoming issue that needed some reorganizing. It was written in sections according to region and they had decided to rearrange it in sections according to whether it related to performance groups or education groups. So my job was to rearrange the sections and edit where necessary. It was pretty simple after I figured out how to make the sections flow smoothly together.

At the beginning of the week I spent some time revising the roles documentation after our editor had sent back her changes. She changed a lot, but she realized that this was a new process for me so she made sure to comment on almost all of her changes. Most of the changes she made were more of what Carey pointed out during the peer review. She removed lots of unnecessary phrases and pointed out a couple of places where I was inconsistent with terminology. This was my first real contribution of written material that users will end up seeing. Exciting stuff? Not really.

This week started with a developer named Sergey reviewing my new roles documentation for technical correctness. He pointed out to me that the way I had described one function “editing a role” was incorrect. He explained to me that the “editing a role” function did not work the way most people (even people at Siemens PLM Software) thought it would.

Monday and Tuesday again consisted of doing states. I was finishing up the updated word counts on Monday. On Tuesday Matt had placed a new folder in the Intern folder on the server and it had the "Passing Through" capsules on states and he just asked me to finish up what I could on those.

Last week again consisted of working on states. I guess the time that I left for Spain and the time that I came back ended up being bad because I left during one issue's states and came back during the next issue's states. No break yet from it!

But alas, either this Wednesday or Thursday I'll get my break from states. It couldn't come at a better time because I am getting incredibly burnt out on writing those. Especially since I've known for awhile that I'm going to be writing a feature article. Knowing that just makes me anxious to get started on it.

I began this week testing the last of the context sensitive help. Same old same old. On Tuesday I started a new project that included collaborating with my aunt. There is a feature in NX called "roles". These roles can be system default or user created and they are basically pre-packaged user interface designs. My project is to edit the help on the topic and include features that were left out when the original documentation was written. This is my first real opportunity to create new content for the online help.