More spelling words

These two easy words have been giving me nothing but trouble since I was in elementary school:

• research
• business

The problem is that when I first learned these words, I somehow added extra sounds to their phonetic spellings. For research, I almost always write "reasearch", and for business, I usually write "bussiness".

Because I've been spelling these words incorrectly for so long, it's hard to shake the habit. Hopefully by adding them to my spelling list, I'll be more careful when writing them.

Transmital Letter Rewritting Exercise

The following is a practice exercise in rewriting for a specific audience. Given that this exercise matches closely with goals on my learning plan, I feel that it is appropriate to write up my work here.

Rewrite this paragraph…

Here’s a copy of our final report, Power from the People: User-powered Computer Labs, the report you asked us on April 15 to complete by July 15. We think it’s just what the university should do.

… (1) for this audience…

This version of the report is written for the university’s Director of Facilities Management. The Director will review your report to decide whether to spend approximately $180,000 to outfit one of the Clearihue computer labs with 26 stationary bicycles that would generate enough electricity to power the computers. If the project goes ahead, you’ve been promised the full-time job of your choice with the company that would provide the materials to adapt the lab.

… (2) and then this audience.

This version of the report is written for a group of university students that wants to pressure the university administration into adopting environmentally friendly practices. You’re a member of this group, so the transmittal letter is addressed to your peers.

(1)
Attached is our final report, "Power from the People: User-powered Computer Labs", which presents a case for adapting the Clearihue computer labs to run on user generated power. This report is backed up by three months of research, and if implemented it has the opportunity not only to save the University of Victoria (UVic) money but also to make UVic an environmental leader in the international community.

(2)
I've attached my report that I sent to the university administration on installing exercise bikes to power the Clearihue computer labs. The plan in this report would significantly reduce UVic's carbon footprint and would set a good example for other universities to follow. Unfortunately, the administation isn't going to budge easily on this one. We should start flyering on campus to raise awareness and put some pressure on them.

Stream of Consciousness Exercise - Programming

It's interesting to think about how people's attitudes towards programming languages has changed over the years. It's even more interesting to consider how they've stayed the same.

Back when everyone wrote their code in assembly language, all that anyone cared about was speed. This was closely linked to the fact that at that time, programmer's wadges were cheap compared to the cost of the computer systems they were coding on. This lead to the idea that the most important thing for a programmer to do was to write efficient code that squeezed out the maximum amount of computation in the fewest number of clock cycles. Programmers were experts at using nonsensical tricks to improve computational speed, like adding a number to itself three times instead of multiplying it by three.

Most programmers were very opposed to high-level programming languages when they first came out, claiming that they were to slow to ever be useful and simply a way of "babying" their user. It wasn't until it was shown that FORTRAN could produce code almost as fast as well optimised assembler, that it was widely adoped.

You must now be thinking, "Great. They all adopted FORTRAN and never looked back, right?" Unfortunatly, no. This macho attitude is still around today! On a fairly regular basis, you run into a coder who insists on writing a system in a relatively low-level language like C, when in reality the problem is not computationally intensive and a solution written in a high-level language like Python or Ruby could be coded in half the time. Not to mention that the high-level version will be easy to understand for maintainers latter on!

So the morals of this fable are:

• Never underestimate the pervasiveness of irrational macho thought
• Think about how fast the program you're writing really needs to be. It's easy to speed up high-level code by rewriting the slowest parts in a low-level language, but doing the reverse is no small chore!
  

Words I Have Trouble Spelling - 2

Wow, this blog has really been gathering some dust lately. I'm going to have to try harder to work time for it into my schedule!

Anyways, without further ado, below is an amendment to the list of words I often misspell.

caffeine

carriage

coincide
consistent

parallel

pyramidal

tomorrow

Words I Have Trouble Spelling

I'm compiling an ongoing list of words which I consistently misspell:

discernible

writing

written

Document Design

Today in class we learned some document design techniques to improve the look and readability of our writing.

One technique which we didn't cover is the principle of grouping and its relationship with strong alignment and proximity.

The concept of grouping is simply that elements (sentences, headings, images, etc...) which are related are visually connected. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by placing the elements in close proximity with each other. For example, if the caption for an image or diagram is placed directly under it (or even better, the text of the caption is worked into the diagram itself), then it will be easier for readers to interpret and recognize the relationship between the caption and the graphic.

Strong alignment is another technique to achieve visual grouping and relates to having the discernible edges of elements lined up horizontally or vertically.

A good example of when strong alignment is used in practice is when using bulleted lists: each bulleted point is offset from the body text and left-aligned to a consistent vertical line. This differentiates the bulleted items from the body copy and groups them together.

New Blog

In order to improve my ability to write on the spot, I've decided to start this blog where I'll practice stream of conscious writing. The goal is to sit down and, given a topic, write without stoping or pausing to think. This can help develop the ability to communicate spontaneously.

I also may use this space as a journal of interesting ideas and this going on in my life.

Cheers and thanks for reading,
Eric