Anna Bogdanowicz recently profiled my co-authors, Brenda Huettner and Kit Brown, for IEEE's The Institute. Learn more about Brenda and Kit in this informative article!

P.S. If you haven't gotten your copy yet, order it from Wordware Publishing. You'll get 35% off, and free shipping if you live in the continental United States.

If any part of your job involves putting content on the Web, head over to A List Apart and take the Web Design Survey.

And I'll be there, presenting Keeping Your Sanity While Managing Virtual Teams with Brenda Huettner and Kit Brown, and Choosing a Usable Help Authoring Tool: Selecting Software that Enhances the Help Author's Experience.

(What I think is funny is that I'll be seeing folks who I normally only see once or twice a year...for the second time in a month!)

Yes, he's getting tall! (I know, what a surprise ;-) )

At the soccer field, waiting for his game to start. (We won, 4-1.)

Sitting on the couch, holding a plastic Easter egg.

A friend sent me this "quick bit of fun":

1. Go to google.com.
2. Click Maps.
3. On the top bar, click Get Directions.
4. Enter New York in the left "from" field.
5. Enter Paris in the right "to" field.

Check out step #23.

Tonight, I'm going to the STC Northern New England chapter (this, of course, assumes that the storms coming in bring reasonable amounts of snow!). Because of a couple of communication glitches, I'll be presenting two sessions: The Future of Communication (short and entertaining) and Choosing a HAT: Finding the Best Fit.

I like visiting the Northern New England chapter...it's a fairly quick trip, the people are always friendly, the food is good, and I get a bottle of real maple syrup :-)

Documentation and Training: The User Experience runs from April 18th to April 21st in Vancouver. You can still register, and they just announced that there will be free access to the exhibition area on April 19 and April 20 (including a networking cocktail reception from 5 to 6:30 pm on April 19).

I'll be presenting a session on how managers can choose a Help authoring tool for their teams, and I'll be co-presenting a session on maintaining your sanity while working with a virtually distributed team (with Brenda Huettner and Kit Brown, my amazing co-authors of Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools).

Microsoft will be releasing security patches today (after all, it's Tuesday!). One of these patches may require a hotfix on some Windows XP systems that use Realtek audio drivers.

After installing the patches and restarting your computer, the Realtek HD Audio Control Panel may not start, and an error message may display:

Rthdcpl.exe - Illegal System DLL Relocation

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

The problem is that hhctrl.ocx and user32.dll files have conflicting base addresses.

Microsoft KB article 935448 links to a download that includes a hotfix for this.

Note: You must have Windows XP SP2 installed.

'Twas another great conference :-)

On day 3, I attended Joe Welinske and Scott Boggan's session on A Design Review of User Assistance in Microsoft Vista. I think they did a good job of presenting Vista Help's new features: the resizable Help pane, simple search as the primary navigation (no index, a minimal TOC, no advanced search), and Guided Help. They also pointed out some of the deficiencies: only Microsoft, OEMs, and corporations can use and customize Vista Help; no popups; can't view more than one Help file at a time. The only thing I think they got wrong is that the Help viewer has been ported back to Windows XP...I see it when I request Help in Office 2007.

One of the biggest changes (for me, anyway) is the new definition for "online Help", which now means "Help when there is an Internet connection". For years, "online Help" has meant any Help file. Get ready to change your mindset ;-) (Offline Help is that which is available when there isn't an Internet connection. Of course!)

The next session I went to was Dana Worley's Migrating from WinHelp to HTML Help Using Doc-To-Help. Dana spent many years creating WinHelp without a HAT, and she tested several different HATs before choosing Doc-To-Help. Her session included statistics on how well these different HATs imported her hand-coded WinHelp projects, taking into account how well the Help worked with her applications (including context-sensitive Help), formatting and appearance, TOC and index, aliases, and popups. Her handouts included charts comparing her evaluation criteria with each of the HATs that she evaluated.

Prof. Geoffrey K. Pullum, Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz, gave the closing keynote. Called Far from the Madding Gerund: Observations About Language, Pullum talked about how it's okay to split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, and more. He also talked about Microsoft's trademark page, and how Microsoft breaks their own rules (they state, "do not use the Windows trademark in the possessive or plural form...um...isn't Windows itself a plural? They also use the possessive form of several trademarks in various supplemental pages on their site.)

At the end of the keynote, Pullum took questions, and one woman asked that he blog about the various points he discussed, addressing it to Joe (her boss). Pullam did.