Old Dog Meets a New Word and is Better for Expanding

Typically, when I see a mistake in someone else's writing, it is a typo or using "its" when the writer meant "it's" in their sentence. Such mistakes are also single offenders. However, this morning, on a Monday, I saw this article - The 25 worst cover songs of all time, ranked -- Artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and David Bowie are among the big names who've turned beloved classics into mangled monstrosities -- By Stephen Thomas Erlewine--Published-Wednesday 8:00AM.Not only did I see a typo, but I also increased my vocabulary by one word. I used italics to indicate the error and bold to indicate the new word that I added to my vocabulary.:

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Whatever the reason for the failings by these artists, there’s no disputing that the original songs remain beloved, which is why brutally bad updates can be so difficult to swallow. This list of the 25 worst cover songs, like our look at the 25 best cover songs of all time, doesn’t pretend be comprehensive. Still, as we surveyed the last five decades of pop and rock music, we’ve done our best to corral the truly awful covers and order them in a way that metes out some semblance of order, if not justice.

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Notice that the Published date is "Wednesday" which I presume is 11-08-2023. Today is Monday, 11-13-2023, which means the following typos have existed for 5 days and either no one has informed the author. The first mistake is that "doesn't pretend be comprehensive" is missing the word "to" in the sentence. The sentence should be: "doesn't pretend to be comprehensive." The word I added to my vocabulary is mete, which I initially believed was a typo. However, mete is a word and this is the definition I found through the Internet:

to give out by measure : dole out. She realized the stern retribution which justice metes to the murderer.
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mete

I now feel like I have learned today - can I go home now? [GRIN]

I do not want to go home. I am re-linking shell Word files for the P4 applications in our CMDB in my RoboHelp 2015 project for the Disaster Recovery documentation. Yes, MRDR--Mister Disaster Recovery Documentation (tm) is still working with RoboHelp 2015, not RoboHelp 2022. Perhaps that would be worth a blog post to freeze this moment at work?

Zipping files with 7z.exe

I continue to work on the Disaster Recovery documentation at work. For future reference, this is the DOS batch file I run each morning to back up my RoboHelp projects that reside in my c:\rh folder. I reduced the font size to avoid ugly line breaks - you are welcome! <grin>

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cd\
c:
cd rh
REM | BROKEN COMMAND: for /d %%X in (*) do "I:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | BROKEN Command: for /d %%X in (*) do "f:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | BROKEN Command below this line:
REM | for /d %X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%X.zip" "%X\"
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5 –tzip
SET %Today%=%Date:~10,4%_%Date:~4,2%_%Date:~7,2%
ren dr-doc.zip %TODAY%_H-rh-dr-doc_Dr-doc.zip
md "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
move *.zip "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
cd\
c:
cd rh-2022
REM | BROKEN Command: for /d %%X in (*) do "f:\7-Zip-Command-Line\7za.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5
REM | UNBROKEN Command below this line:
for /d %%X in (*) do "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a "%%X.zip" "%%X\" -mx=5 –tzip
ren dr-doc_rh2022.zip %TODAY%_dr-doc_rh2022.zip
move *.zip "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%"
pause
md "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%\Templates"
cd\
c:
xcopy c:\Users\prhanson\Desktop\Templates\*.* /s "s:\technical documentation\_storage\2023\%TODAY%\Templates"

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There was a period in time where my DOS batch file was not functioning correctly so I used the following resource to correct it:

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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34602813/zipping-files-with-7z-exe - Zipping files with 7z.exe

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Podcast 127: Creating Playbooks 12th September 2022

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The Essence of What I Want to Do

While I am not qualified for the job below - I am not a programmer - I love the first 8 words in the line below.

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Developing software to automate the manual work required to keep a SaaS offering highly available, scalable, and resilient to the vagaries of the Internet and frequent deploys.

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It is the the requirement that I love to see and, truly, even though I do not consider myself a programmer, I do see value in using snippets, variables, DOS batch files, and Word macros as a means to automate manual work. That is the motivation behind writing and updating my Single Source Rant page. I want to un-complicate all aspects of the work I do with Disaster Recovery Documentation and Knowledge Management documentation - work smarter, not harder. It's why being MRDR [(Mister Disaster Recovery Documentation tm)] is who I am after 2334 days (6 years, 4 months, 3 weeks) in my current role. If my life goes according to my plan, I have worked 0.3195071868583162 or, rounded to the nearest 10th, 31.9 % of the 20 years I want to work here. Just to state it again, my plan is to work until Friday, March 28, 2036. I will be 66 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days old on that day and, according to my plan, I will work 115 days (3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days) past my 65th birthday in order to reach 20 years here. That's my plan anyways. 

All that aside, this is the awesome job that I won't apply for.

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Site Reliability Engineer (MasteryConnect)

US-Remote /

Engineering /

Full-time

At Instructure, we believe in the power of people to grow and succeed throughout their lives. Our goal is to amplify that power by creating intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development, facilitate meaningful relationships, and inspire people to go further in their educations and careers. We do this by giving smart, creative, passionate people opportunities to create awesome products and tools.

By focusing on our values — ownership, openness, simplicity, equality, and relationships — and using a modern stack that includes AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Vault, Terraform, Ruby, and Go, we are pushing the boundaries of managing services at scale.

What you will be doing:

• Partnering with engineering teams to automate & optimize service availability, scalability, performance, monitoring, and alerting.
• Educating & empowering software engineers to think operationally when designing services and operate what they build.
• Writing code to simplify DevOps tasks and allow engineers to deploy and debug their own code in production.
• Developing software to automate the manual work required to keep a SaaS offering highly available, scalable, and resilient to the vagaries of the Internet and frequent deploys.
• Creating and maintaining methodologies of iteratively deploying Instructure’s cloud-based architecture.
• Building resilient and self-scaling systems so that you and the team can sleep through the night.

What we look for:

• A desire for ownership and love for problem-solving.
• Experience with Amazon Web Services.
• Programming experience in at least one modern programming language (for example, Ruby, Go, Python, or Node.
• Experience with Containers; Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
• Understanding of configuration management, automation, and infrastructure-as-code tools (for example, Ansible, Terraform, Salt, or Puppet).Code pipelines exposure - Git, Jenkins, Harness, etc.
• Open, team-oriented, with a strong desire to learn.

Get in on all the awesome of Instructure:

• Competitive salary, equity and 401k. 
• Medical, dental, disability, and life insurance. 
• HSA program, vision, voluntary life, and AD&D. 
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Paid time off, 10 paid holidays, and flexible work schedules. 
• Gym club reimbursements and rewards-based fitness tracking.

We’ve always believed in hiring the most awesome people and treating them right. We know that the more diverse we are, the more diverse our ideas will be and when we openly welcome those ideas, our environment is better and our business is stronger..

 At Instructure we participate in E-Verify and yes, in case you didn't catch it from the above, we are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All Instructure employees are required to successfully pass a background check upon being hired.

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Know Your Audience

Peet1 asked a question and Derrick Qian | Microsoft Community Support Specialist tried to answer the question. Derrick Qian | Microsoft Community Support Specialist, but it didn't go especially well as you can read here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/musicandvideo/forum/all/file-explorer/5f4ee4ab-5336-4480-82e8-924dc6bb98e5 - File Explorer. What Peet1 wrote exemplifies the question that has no answer in the technical writing community: How do you write content that authentically helps your audience?

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Hi Derrick. Thanks for your reply and thank you VERY much for the effort you made to try and help me. It takes time and patience to provide the information you have provided. Thank You. What advanced technical people like you do not understand, is that there are millions of people, like me, who do not have a clue what you are talking about. For example:

"1. Manual：　

First create a Desktop.ini file in the folder that needs to be changed, for example:

[.ShellClassInfo]

ConfirmFileOp=0

InfoTip=my folder

IconIndex=0

IconFile=MyFolder.ico

explain:

parameter ConfirmFileOp s........................"

No-one out there, unless they are computer technically trained, knows what this means. Create Desktop.ini: What programme is used to do this? Notepad perhaps? It doesn't say, so I don't know. Does "MyFolder" refer to the folder I'm in? I have too many questions.

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Derrick's answer was helpful to me but not to Peet1. How does Derrick write content that serves BOTH Peet1 and me in a technical support forum?

My manager and I discussed something similar to this yesterday. We were talking about how the SME  who writes the disaster recovery documentation for their system is writing for themselves and how there is really no way to standardize whether their content is useful to someone else until the following (which I am fleshing out after contemplating the discussion overnight): 

• There is a disaster and System ABBA has to be restored
  
• The SME for System ABBA is unavailable
• The SME for System ASIA is available and has technical expertise and knowledge but not for System ABBA. However, given the circumstances, the SME for System ASIA is going to attempt to use the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote.
• If the SME for System ASIA uses the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote and the SME for System ASIA is able to restore System ABBA, 
• then documentation = useful. 
• Else, the SME for System ASIA uses the documentation that the SME for System ABBA wrote and the SME for System ASIA is unable to restore System ABBA, the documentation is not useful.

I also said that I hope we never have a disaster when we have to find out!

Miss Excel Makes 6 Figures a Day

First, go read How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day - Taking an unconventional route to a conventional business

I have these takeaways from the interview:

1. If I branded myself as "MrDR" (as in Mister Disaster Recovery ^TM), I wonder if I'd make 6 figures a day on TikTok?  
2. I also need to look up this book - Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza - as it sounds inspiring.