Countries Beginning with I

Yesterday morning I woke early to make coffee for our guest, out-of-boarding SAGE student Laura, before her 8 am exam. The sun had not yet risen when we came downstairs. I peered out the windows. "What’s that white stuff on the trees?" I wondered. "Frost? Is it that cold?"

We gazed. "It’s snow!"

We opened the door. "It’s snowING!"

We shrieked with delight. Laura, who lives in Paraguay, doesn’t usually get to see snow falling. (I, too, was raised in the tropics, and never saw snow coming out of the sky til I was 11 years old, in Pittsburgh.)

The ground was too warm for it to stick much, and the snow stopped falling after about an hour. Then the temperature plunged; last night was cold, even in Sanjay’s (unusual for Mussoorie) centrally-heated home.

This morning, the snow is back with a vengeance. Still not quite cold enough to stick, but we may be getting there…

It’s almost unheard-of for students to be around when snow begins falling in Mussoorie. Going Down Day - the end of school, when everyone heads down the hill towards home - was traditionally around December 7th, several weeks before the first snowfall was usually expected.

But this year the calendar has been experimentally changed, so school began August 8th (about two weeks later than usual), winter vacation runs December 14th to January 22nd, and the school year ends May 28th. Graduation is after that, on May 30th - ours, in 1981, was on June 25th!

The rationale for this change has not been well explained; I’ve heard that it was intended to allow more time to prepare (or less time to forget) before external exams in the spring, and/or to align better with the American school calendar.

There are historical, practical reasons for the school to have a long winter vacation. The average altitude of the campus is 7000 feet: it gets cold up here! Word on the hillside is that Mussoorie is in for a colder-than-usual winter this year, and, with a looming shortage of propane in the region, the school may have trouble heating itself. Staff usually have bukharis - woodburning stoves - in their living rooms, but in classrooms and offices these have been replaced with gas heaters. Dorm rooms are not heated at all.

Students are allowed to have electric blankets which, along with flannel or fleece sheets, can make getting into bed a far less traumatic experience than it used to be. The only problem is that, eventually, you have to get out again…

Beyond mere physical discomfort, the calendar change has upset the plans of this year’s SAGE (exchange program) families. The Winter Tour, a multi-week gallop all around India, primarily - but not only - for the benefit of SAGE students, has been compressed to 31 days. For some it will be even shorter, as students join or leave the tour at odd times so that the kids also have an opportunity to go home and see their families.

This is undoubtedly a headache for the tour organizers, especially as the tour is moving so fast that it will be hard to catch up with it along the way. Ross wanted to spend some portion of her vacation relaxing in Goa, and the only reasonable solution I could find was to have her join the tour just a week before its end, in Mumbai. It’s a pity she’s missing so much. On the other hand, after a long semester she needs some rest, and this year’s Winter Tour will emphatically not provide that.

The shortened vacation also eats into a beloved staff perk: the opportunity to travel in Asia during the dry (but still warm) season. Woodstock staff don’t get paid much, so these perks count for a lot.

All things considered, I suspect this calendar change is not going to stick, at least not in as drastic a form as we see this year. It’s a pity they had to run this experiment during my daughter’s year here; it would have been nice for her Italian relatives to see her at Christmas.

dancing to "The Beedi Song" from Omkara

When I attended Woodstock School, I never saw Hindi movies. This was partly a matter of logistics: Mussoorie’s two cinemas were available to us only on Saturdays, and a dark movie hall struck me as good mostly for getting groped by strange men - not something I was anxious to encourage; I got enough of that elsewhere in India. (I did venture once or twice, with a gang of friends, to see a rarely-offered English-language film.)

But Hindi films were such a large part of Indian culture that I couldn’t help being aware of them. We heard, and sometimes even sang, fun-silly songs with refrains like "My name is Anthony Gonzales!" or Chal, chal, chal, meri hathi, o meri sathi… ("Let’s go, my elephant, my companion.")

During our senior year (1980-81), the original Om Shanti Om, a disco ditty, took India and the school by storm - we played it, to enthusiastic reception, at every school dance:

…but most of us (even some of the Indian students) still thought Western music and movies were cooler.

Our opportunities to see films of any kind were limited - there were no VCRs or DVD players in those days, and Indian television offered only one state-run black-and-white channel, Doordarshan. The sole television set on campus belonged to Brij Lal, our Hindi teacher, who used it mostly to watch cricket.

These days, Woodstock students have far more choices in entertainment: satellite TV and DVD players in every dorm, and of course you can watch DVDs and Video CDs (widely available in India, and cheaper than DVDs) on your laptop. Mussoorie’s cinemas have both closed down, but are not much missed (though people do happily go to the fancy multiplexes in larger cities).

At the same time, Hindi movies (now bearing the epithet "Bollywood") have gotten better. The stories can still seem ridiculous to cynical American tastes: full of improbable coincidences, with plot points that often hinge on non-Western cultural norms. Bride & Prejudice worked as an update on Jane Austen’s classic because the "transgressions" of the sisters would seem shocking only in a relatively conservative culture like India’s.

Bollywood eye candy has also improved. Though Indian female stars have always been gorgeous, some of the male stars I observed in the 70s could get away with a bit of a paunch straining their fashionable safari suits. No longer. Nowadays they all work out with professional trainers, with results that speak for themselves.

All this, plus a larger Indian population at the school, has led to burgeoning interest in Bollywood movies among Woodstock students - not least, my daughter, whose current dream is to meet Shahrukh Khan. I was amused to have a houseful of (mostly) American exchange students enthralled by this year’s big hit, Om Shanti Om.

And I could understand why. It’s a great, goofy, fun movie. And, contrary to what some reviewers have said, you don’t have to understand all the Bollywood in-jokes to find it amusing.

So what if everyone bursts into song every ten minutes? That just adds to the fun! (And fans of western musical theater can enjoy themselves picking out the musical and scenographic borrowings from "The Phantom of the Opera" in the climactic scene.) Oh, yes - our old friend Arjun Rampal is in it, too.

As soon as I finished the book I rushed out to buy the movie, which is excellent. I can tell good acting when I see it, though I’m having trouble with the dialog: the VCD we bought has Hindi subtitles instead of the promised English, and my Hindi has not yet come back strongly enough for me to follow complex sentences in hifalutin’ semi-Shakespearean language which is at the same time in a western Uttar Pradesh dialect!

I must be the perfect modern employee. In my 20+ years of working life, I have rarely had an office or even a cubicle to call my own, and haven’t particularly wanted or missed one.

In the three-room apartment that was our home in Milan for 13 years, my workspace (when I wasn’t in a shared office) was a corner of our bedroom. The temporary cubes I was assigned on my visits to Silicon Valley were a comparative luxury!

But, even in cramped conditions, working at home had advantages: if my daughter was sick and had to stay home from school, or if public transport was on strike (as happens frequently in Italy) and I couldn’t get to the office, it just didn’t matter. As long as I had a computer and an Internet connection, I could be productive wherever I was.

I began travelling extensively for work around 1994, so I always had a laptop (in addition to or instead of a desktop computer), and was accustomed to working anywhere, anytime.

This became a standing family joke: we would stage pictures of me working in unlikely places: on a P&O ferry from Calais to Dover, at the top of a snowy Alp, on a beach recliner in Martinique.

I did not actually work in any of those places - I do know how to take a vacation. But not being tied to a desk meant that I could work, when I chose, anywhere in the world. I didn’t have to take vacation time to be present at the obligatory family holidays halfway across Italy - I could spend time with the family and still get my work done.

In our new home in Lecco, I have a small home office with a spectacular view - who needs a corporate corner office?

But that’s not enough to keep me in one place. My colleagues at Sun don’t much care where I am physically located (and are scattered all over the world themselves, both in Sun offices and at home), so I can pick up my laptop and go wherever I want to. With my Sun badge, I can waltz into any Sun office in the world and use a desk and high-speed Internet - but I don’t have to.

Right now I’m in India, visiting my daughter at my old school. Thanks to the hospitality of a classmate, I’m in a comfortable home with a more-than-decent Internet connection - I can even use Skype to keep in touch with my colleagues. The only thing lacking is a desk, but, hey, I’ve still got a lap.

And the view ain’t too shabby, either.

How about you? Are you ready to give up a cube or office?

^ even Jabarkhet has satellite

When I attended Woodstock (1977-1981), communication from and within India was fraught with difficulty. Letters to foreign countries - even in Asia - took weeks. Packages arrived damaged, or not at all. (Nowadays, Indian mail is more reliable than Italian.)

In my four years in Mussoorie I spoke with my parents by phone twice, I think, and can’t remember now what for - there must have been some kind of emergency or urgent news.

There were only a few phones on campus, and none in teachers´ residences except perhaps the principal´s. The few we had didn’t work very well: calling across Mussoorie could take several attempts to get a line at all. Calling out of town required that a “trunk call” be booked hours in advance, and such calls were extremely expensive.

^ mobile phone shop posters in Landour Bazaar, Mussoorie

In 1996, Steve Ediger arrived to take on the Herculean task of bringing Woodstock into the modern age of computers and communications, just as India itself was making a great technological leap forward. 10+ years later, what wonders have been wrought!

• Every staff home, office and dorm now has one or more phones, routed through a central switchboard - and, generally, they work.
• This year, a new VOIP systems makes international calls dirt cheap: Rs. 3 (7 US cents) per minute. The drawback is that the kids can call out from the dorm phones only during the limited hours when they are not in school, at activities, or studying, and usually have to wait their turn to do so. With families spread around the globe, this makes for a small window of time in which they can talk to their information-starved parents (who, in this day and age, expect to be able to stay in constant touch with their kids).
• Every staff home and residence has satellite television. Those who wish also have their own DVD players, stereos, iPod speakers, etc.
• Most staff homes are now on campus generators, so Mussoorie’s uneven power supply doesn’t fry out all that delicate electronic equipment.
• Most staff and many students now have cellphones. (Kids are not allowed to carry or use them during the schoolday.)

^ mobile phone charging station at the Barista coffee shop in Kulri Bazaar, Mussoorie.

And, of course, Woodstock is online. In 1998 I helped to create the school’s first website (the site has come a long way since then), and trained staff members in web basics such as AltaVista search - on a connection that was so slow we had to turn off images in the browser in order to load a page at all.

Today the school has about 300 computers connected to the Internet, sharing only 2 mbps of bandwidth among them. This is (barely) enough for general business and school use, but can’t stand up to today’s video-heavy websites, especially at those times of day when students are free to surf, email, etc.

The problem is that bandwidth is still expensive in India (for lack of competition): it would cost at least $100,000 per year to get 8 mbps (ADSL) for the whole campus; by comparison, I can reliably get 7 mbps at my home in Italy for €39 per month. At these prices, no wonder India lags in Internet adoption.

This situation is bound to improve: perhaps the long-promised fibre-optic cable to the school will finally be delivered, or maybe WiMax will come to India (this would be a better long-term solution than cables, which in rural India are frequently inadvertently dug up or cut). I look forward to the day when both the school and the country can enjoy the full benefits of this critical piece of modern infrastructure.

^ 2004: Steve Ediger shows off his server room. I trust my Sun colleagues will note what is wrong with this picture! ; )

article: Woodstock School: Education for a World of Difference on Dell/EMC Storage (go to page 22)

How has technical writing evolved in the age of the Internet? How have tech writers’ jobs changed, and how should they continue to change, in response to new technologies now available for sharing knowledge with our customers?

Prologue: The Dead Tree Society

My technical writing career began twenty years ago, with the design and writing of software training courses for desktop publishing. These were delivered as printed sheets in a binder used in face-to-face classroom training.

The first manual I wrote was for an optical-character recognition software. Soon after that, I co-authored a very technical book (Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, Random House, 1993), which included a manual for Easy CD 1.0 (later named by PC World one of the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time).

The book was one of the first in the world to include a CD, for which I produced a screen-readable, hypertext-rich version of the text (the CD also contained a demo version of the software). This early experience demonstrated the power and flexibility of electronic texts, but we still had to deliver them on physical media.

Moving It Online

Between 1992 and 1995, I wrote manuals and software-based help for several versions of Easy CD and other CD recording software. Paper manuals were (and are) expensive to produce, print, and distribute. Even "online" help, when it’s deeply hooked into the software (e.g., context-sensitive help for each dialog box) could not be rev’d any more frequently than the software.

As we entered the Web 1.0 age, customers’ expectations of company responsiveness increased, and these old, familiar processes were no longer fast enough. We needed a way to provide customers with updated and expanded information about our software, on demand (in response to FAQs and newly-discovered bugs as they arose), and at low cost.

The worldwide web came to the rescue. When the small software company I worked for was bought by Adaptec, I had pages ready to post on Adaptec’s new website. I soon found myself responsible for the busiest (though not the largest) section of the Adaptec site, which eventually brought in up to 70% of overall traffic - clearly, we were providing information that customers wanted.

Usability

Meanwhile, a separate but converging trend in the industry aimed to improve software usability. After years of slaving over manuals, I realized that, for most users, RTFM is a last-ditch solution. At least where consumer software is concerned, most of us just dive in and start using it, and only look to documentation when we can’t figure out something from the UI (user interface). Users increasingly expected that they should NOT need to open a book or help file, except maybe when using advanced features - a reasonable expectation, I think.

I further observed that, when a software process or feature is difficult (as opposed to complex) to document, this usually means that something’s wrong in the software design. I began working closely with the engineers, initially during beta testing, then earlier in the design phase so that I could try to head off UI problems from the start, rather than be told later: "We won’t have time to fix that til the next release."

And I worked directly on the UI, writing and editing text strings for dialog boxes, etc. This was obviously a job for a tech writer: the clearer the messages onscreen, the less I would have to explain in the manual.

Collaborating with the Community

Around 1993, I had begun to interact daily with customers online, and soon learned to value their knowledge. No QA (quality assurance) or tech writing team can spend as many hours with a product as a large pool of users will collectively spend with it, nor can an internal team hope to duplicate all the diverse situations in which customers will use it. When we tap into what customers know about our products, both sides benefit.

In the mid-90s, I was an active participant on Usenet forums, answering questions where I could, keeping an eye on hot issues, and conveying customers’ knowledge and issues back to the company. (NB: By late ‘95/early ‘96 I had handed off my manual-writing job.)

In 1996, I launched a moderated, email-based discussion list which fulfilled the same functions, but in a more controlled and congenial atmosphere. The same concept is seen today in discussion forums run by companies on company sites (which may not be moderated or even monitored).

My role as a tech writer in these virtual meeting places was to work with users to find answers to problems, then to "pretty up" and post that information to the website and, in the longer term, write it into the documentation and/or take note of it in future product design.

I did not originate all this new material (that wouldn’t have been humanly possible!), but my deep knowledge of the technology and ability to write about it in layman’s terms made me ideally suited to fit this new "outside" information into the bigger picture - I was now more a knowledge editor and manager than a writer.

Where I did create original material, it was usually in response to customer FAQs and other expressed or observed customer needs. By staying close to customers and interacting with them daily, I kept a finger on the pulse and knew what they needed/wanted, sometimes before they knew themselves. I considered myself a conduit for information between customers and the company, translating from user-speak to engineer-speak (or boss-speak) where necessary.

New Tools

In the six years since I quit my job with Roxio, the technologies available for online communication and collaboration have, of course, moved on. We now have two very powerful new tools: blogs and wikis. How should we use them, and other new tools that will doubtless show up in the future? That’s a topic for another article… (coming soon!)

Your thoughts? If you’re a tech writer, how have you seen your role evolving, and what do you anticipate for the future?

Since I’ve been in Italy, I’ve gotten out of the habit of telephoning: anywhere, anyone, for any reason. Aside from the enormous difficulties of installing a phone line in Italy and keeping it working (which, if you’re lucky, you will only suffer through once), everything involved in using a phone is simply ridiculously difficult here.

They keep bringing us new phone books every year, but I haven’t actually opened one in as long as I can remember. Why? Because it’s almost impossible to find any useful information in them. When I left the US in 1991, I was accustomed to using the yellow pages to find businesses or services close to home. The categories made sense to me, and were usefully cross-referenced.

With the Italian Pagine Gialle, I soon gave up. There is some logic to how businesses are described there which completely eludes me. This may have been an early lack of vocabulary on my part, but there are other problems.

What if I already know the exact business I’m looking for and its address, and simply need a number to call them? Hah! Life should be so easy. The Pagine Gialle (or Bianche - white pages) don’t help there, either.

Next time you buy something with a credit card in an Italian shop, look at the credit card receipt, which carries the official incorporated name of the business. This name is often not even remotely similar to the shop name on the sign outside.

It is this official business name which gets listed in the phone books, I suppose because all of the business’ financial and legal documents, including its phone contract, are done in this name. Which is absolutely no help to you, the consumer.

The online version of the Pagine Gialle has the same problem. At a conference I attended in Torino last December, one of the speakers was an exec from PagineGialle.it. I cornered him afterwards to ask about this.

"It’s our biggest problem," he sighed. "To have anything other than the official business name listed, they have to pay. Most don’t bother."

No concept of "doing business as", evidently.

So, if you use a business that you think you might want to call sometime, be sure to pick up a card and take it home - that’s the only way you’re ever going to find their number.

This doesn’t apply to larger and non-storefront companies - most of those are listed under the name you’re familiar with, so you can find a number and just call, right?

Wrong.

Not many Italian companies seem to be using voicemail, which phone-tree-scarred Americans might think is a relief. In Italy, you call a central switchboard number, you get a live person.

But who have you got? As Michelle points out, it’s not necessarily a receptionist. I have seen with my own eyes security guards at the entrance to one of Fastweb’s corporate HQs in Milan, attempting to shepherd visitors through an elaborate entry process (including printed badges with photographs) - while simultaneously answering switchboard and tech support calls!

It’s no wonder, then, that no receptionist I’ve encountered in Italy has ever offered to take a message and have me called back, and they seem surprised and offended when I request it. The best you’ll get is: "He’ll be back after so-and-so time, call then."

All this probably accounts for the rapid spread of cellphones in Italy. There has never been a directory of cellphone numbers, but no one missed it because the landline directory we already knew was of limited usefulness anyway. People print their cell numbers on their business cards, so you’d better hold onto those and/or put the numbers into your phone.

With a cellphone, you don’t have to go through a switchboard, and, in the rare event that a call goes unanswered, you can always leave a message or send an SMS.

All of this fits neatly into Italy’s cultural preference for personal connections. Cold-contacting a new company (even if you want to buy something from them!) can be damned near impossible here: it all depends on who you know personally - and having their cellphone number.

I wrote 18 months ago about my disappointment with KLM’s poor handling of a bereavement situation (KLM Tries Harder… But Fails). I’m flying a lot again these days (three trips to the US this year, plus several to the UK, and now India). I still receive promotional emails from Flying Blue, the alliance which KLM and Air France have now become, to remind me that they’re waiting to serve me, but it was hard to get over that incident. (NB: I receive nothing from British Airways, with whom I was also a top-level frequent flyer until 2001; perhaps they’ve lost track of me.)

But… I still had all this mileage sitting around with KLM (58,000+), and some flexibility (for once) in planning my upcoming trip to India. So I hopped on the KLM site to see what could be done.

The awards booking process (which gets good marks on usability) informed me that I needed 70,000 miles to go to India - but they would advance me the missing mileage. This was automatic in the system, though it was a little weird - at first it looked as if that offer was only valid if I flew on Tuesday, but when I tried again a few days later, it was offered for Wednesday (my ideal departure date) as well. So I got exactly the flight I wanted for "free" (still had to pay over €200 in "taxes and fees").

In the meantime, researching other airlines, I had learned, to my horror, that the baggage limit of 20 kg from Europe to India now seems to apply to all airlines. I know that on all my previous trips I have carried two heavy suitcases in and out of Delhi, and only one of those trips was business class. I guess this is some new trick of the airlines to squeeze more money out of their hapless passengers. The standard rate for excess baggage is €30 per kilo (!!!) - no less than Air India’s rate that I was screaming about earlier this year.

However… I’m a Platinum member on Flying Blue. Turns out that that entitles me to 20 kg extra baggage - just what I need to bring Ross her winter clothing and the food goodies she craves in boarding school.

The flight I’m booked on is actually Air France, which is a bit disappointing - I much prefer KLM’s home base of Schipol airport to Charles de Gaulle - and we will have to drive to Malpensa at an ungodly hour Wednesday. I reserve judgement on comfort and service til I get there, but remember Air France as being okay (last time I flew they still allowed smoking on board, which tells you how long ago it was).

In short, treating me well as a once and maybe future frequent flyer has won big points for Flying Blue. Let’s see how well they maintain this relationship.

Share your airline experiences - who do you like (or not), and why (or why not)?

When we moved into our apartment in Milan in 1991, we were young and just getting started in life - which is code for "didn’t have much money". Our furniture all came from Ikea, with supplementary storage: the old trunks we had shipped our stuff in from the US.

Our light fixtures for years were the same bare bulbs on wires that had been present when we bought the place. Once you’re accustomed to the fierce, unobstructed glare of a 150-watt bulb, it’s hard to get used to lower levels of light.

But, over time, we gradually upgraded some of our cheap furniture to get more storage space, Enrico got a new piano, and real light fixtures slowly began to appear. Each choice of a new one was agonizing. When we replaced the final bare bulb with a real ceiling lamp, sometime around 2001, we joked: "Now the house is all finished - we’ll have to move!"

And, not too long after that, we did move. The thirteen years we had spent in that apartment in Milan was the longest I’d ever lived in any dwelling in my life (which might be the case for Enrico as well - his family, unusually for Italians, moved quite a bit when he was young). We were no longer accustomed to change. Perhaps that’s why we were in a hurry to feel settled in our new apartment in Lecco, and had it completely furnished, including ceiling fixtures, in record time. Of course we then had to move again.

We’ve now been in our house for three years, and, once again, it was unpacked and looking very finished, very quickly. But it’s a big place; there’s always room for improvement.

Some time during the second year we finally replaced the last temporary light fixture, in the entryway. There had been no reason to rush: it had a big white-glass globe bulb, and almost looked intentional. Except that Enrico tended to point it out to any visitors complimenting us on our lovely home: "Yes, but we still have to find a light fixture for that…"

So finally one day he came home with this:

It’s even local, made by a company in Lecco called Leuci. High coolness factor: you can position the tentacles any way you want.

The hanging is Indian; I won it at auction at the Woodstock reunion last summer. We still needed a coat rack for that corner - always useful by an entry - and Enrico found this adorable wrought-iron one in a small town in the mountains during one of his hiking excursions. (No, Italians don’t usually wear baseball caps - I use them to keep the sweat out of my eyes when gardening.)

More recently, we hung a beautiful tapestry (handcrafted by a women’s cooperative in Gujarat) that my classmate Sara brought us - stunning piece, see the detail at the top of this page. I moved next to it a watercolor of the Mussoorie hills done years ago by my Woodstock art teacher, Kathleen Forance, which had previously been overlooked and neglected in a hall corner.

…and I can think of lots more things to do to the house (not to mention the garden). My stay with Gianluca and Brian in San Francisco was inspiring: Brian’s trained as an interior designer, and it shows in their beautiful place. I’ll have to steal a few ideas from him. And I plan on some serious shopping during my upcoming India trip.

But we’ll never call this house "finished" - if we did, we would have to move again.

When my husband was young (and probably still today), Italians played a verbal game in which you made up a name for a fictional somebody of a particular nation. The name had to sound authentic to the nationality chosen, and, of course, it had to be funny.

For example:

Il famoso tuffatore giapponese: Sezoki Maspinto.

The famous Japanese high diver: [Se so chi m'ha spinto] - If I know [knew] who pushed me!

La famosa prostituta greca: Mika Teladogratis.

The famous Greek prostitute: I’m certainly not going to give it to you free! (Mica = not a chance, no way.)

La famosa prostituta del Far West: Calatemi Jeans.

The famous prostitute of the [American] West: Take down my jeans. (A pun on Calamity Jane.)

Il famoso motociclista giapponese: Tofuzo Lamoto.

The famous Japanese motorcyclist: T’ho fuso la moto - I melted your motorcycle [engine].

Il famoso investigatore rumeno: Ora Lipescu.

The famous Rumanian investigator: Now I’ll catch them (li pesco - literally "I’ll fish them").

La famosa prostituta russa: Vagina Seminova.

The famous Russian prostitute: Semi-New Vagina.

Il famoso tuffatore arabo: Momeyet.

The famous Arab diver: Mo’ me getto - (in Roman dialect) - Now I’ll throw myself [in].

Il famoso spedizioniere cinese: C’hon Furgon Cin.

The famous Chinese courier: C’ho un furgoncino = I have a little van!

Got one to add? Aggiungete i vostri!

Complaints are common about the Italian postal service, but I thought things were getting better. And maybe they are, measured strictly against la posta’s own previous service levels, which have always been dire.

But consider these events… [more] [in italiano]