From huey.callison at gmail.com  Fri Apr  6 15:35:49 2007
From: huey.callison at gmail.com (Huey Callison)
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 17:35:49 -0400
Subject: Welcome to the STC QPI SIG email list
In-Reply-To: <LYRIS-336916-3106150-2007.04.06-16.15.12--huey.callison#gmail.com@lists.stc.org>
References: <LYRIS-336916-3106150-2007.04.06-16.15.12--huey.callison#gmail.com@lists.stc.org>
Message-ID: <80f119a50704061435s5d237ee5ha4b4821b4aaa72de@mail.gmail.com>

On 4/6/07, Lyris ListManager <lyris at lists.stc.org> wrote:
> Please introduce yourself to the list. Send a brief bio or message telling
> about your work, your interests, or both to:

Afternoon all, I'm Huey Callison, a process analyst/software
designer/tech writer/software QA guy/sysadmin/tech support guy/sales
dude/trainer/generalist/everything-except-'boss'-and-'developer' for a
software consultancy in Fairfax Virginia.

About five years ago, I had a promising career as a major-ISP
sysadmin, and the dotcrash landed me in a tech writer job that I was a
little less than qualified for. Fast-forward to the present day, and
much to my surprise, I'm the go-to technical writer guy in the
company, people keep asking me to re-engineer their doc-writing
process or explain IEEE 12207, CMMi, and Microsoft Structured
Framework to them, and I've been promoted to a position that I'm even
less qualified for. As such, I'm constantly scrambling, both to
increase my own base of knowledge, and to apply that knowledge to make
good recommendations to other folks on the best way for them to do
stuff. And I get to do all of that in my copious free time, while
driving a half-dozen pretty hair-raising projects of my own, and
trying to figure out how I'd complete the "bachelors required, masters
recommended" that'd 'qualify' me for my current position.

The current nut I'm trying to crack is DITA. I have content in Word,
HTML, Flare, HTML Help, and MS Help. Much of that, conceptually, is
built from the same basic information. DITA therefore seems like a
no-brainer, except for the following:

What do I use to get the content into DITA-compliant XML in the first
place, bearing in mind that the tools at my disposal are a) things
that are already paid for (Visual Studio, Word) or b) things that are
free ( http://www.conglomerate.org/intro.html ) since I'm pretty
certain that I'm not going to have a huge amount of luck making a
business case for "Why we need a zillion squillion dollars to buy 20
licenses for" (AuthorIT, Structured Frame, whatever everybody else is
using as an XML editor) ?

I hope I'm in the right place. Halp?

-- 
Huey