Shanghai Tech Writer

This past week was a slow week at work but I’m not complaining. It’s a much needed break after three-intense weeks of editing, preparing, and sending a project for final review. I was able to work on other tasks like fixing CARs (bugs) and cleaning up my desktops (both my computer and actual desk). There’s always something to do when not writing documentation. Today I did some massive cleaning! I sorted through all the random stacks of paper on my desk, everything from drafts, edits, reviews, specs, project plans, tax receipts, scratch paper, and used tissues. After I filed away all the paper, I wiped my desk clean with wet tissues. I read somewhere that desks and keyboards are among the “dirtiest” places in a building, not the bathroom. Indeed, I was pretty disgusted by the amount of dirt I wiped off my desk despite the deceptively white and seemingly clean surface. I flipped over my keyboard and banged it a few times. Lots of stuff came out.

After I cleaned up my physical desktop, I started cleaning up my virtual desktop. My once “Powerful PC” has not been too well ever since I started installing the latest versions of LabVIEW. I say versions because writing documentation during part of the software development process means we have to deal with software bugs all the time. Every time I or someone finds a bug in the software, it gets reported and fixed. Then there are tools to generate daily builds/installers, so we have to uninstall and reinstall the software every day. I’ve had to do this countless number of times already and every I time I uninstall/reinstall, I suspect a few pieces of junk and leftover processes are being left behind, swallowing up my computer memory. Or maybe it’s because I usually have too many applications open simultaneously. In any case, it was time to do some purging!

I started uninstalling applications that I don’t use or haven’t used for a long time hoping to free up some memory. It’s amazing how much stuff I have installed on the computer! Unfortunately, there weren’t that many things I could uninstall since I needed most of the tools for documentation! However, I did find three versions of Microsoft Office (XP, 2003, and 2007) and was wondering why I had three versions. I didn’t think much before I uninstalled XP and 2003, only to realize afterwards why I had three versions installed in the first place!! I totally forgot! I needed Word XP to write math equations and Access 2003 for the LabVIEW VI database!

It took me a while to reinstall Office and reconfigure the settings again. I probably added a few more junk files to the list of culprits that are hogging up my memory resources.

Grr. . .

The moral of the story is: Don’t be too overly ambitious and productive because that might just lead to trouble.

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