Some of my most aggressive and varied work has been of a technical nature.
An early piece, A Beginner's Guide to Controlling the IBM Parallel Port instructed people who wanted to use their computer's parallel port to read switches or control motors, with particular emphasis on controlling stepper motors. Code included with the book was Borland's Turbo Pascal. I wrote that, too. I smart monkey. I've also written code for this in LabVIEW and Delphi. It's been a while, though.
F.L.A.P.S. (Flexible Automated Programs), a software package with a silly name was actually a pretty neat project. This collection of MatLab "M" files translated data from human posture and balance experiments. It would torture the data using a number of filters and reorganize the disparate sources into MatLab matrices and neat plots. I wrote the majority of this software (there had been a model in place, but it wasn't functional) and particularly the UI parts. I also wrote the horkin' manual. I got to use Poser to make the little pictures of the person with reflective dots on their body. How fun!
A recent technical piece was a User's Guide for the EPM1000 Joulemeter/Power Meter, an instrument which (with the correct detector) measures laser power, energy, exposure, rep rates, and lots of other things. Not such a big manual, but lots of information and diagrams. If you want to see a full copy in Portable Document Format, visit Molectron Detector's Corporate Website, but keep in mind that they've been bought by Coherent, so probably everything I did will be supplanted by the templates from Coherent.
So no one thinks I'm too boring, I've written lots of these little things as well -- data sheets, news releases, product blurbs, you name it.
This is really quite a happy career for me! I do love tech writing, particularly since technological civilization will collapse in less than a year. Oh well, if you can't get rendered obsolete, what's good in life?
I've also built a few direct mail and magazine advertisements, in color and B&W (for you folks under 25, "B&W" is what we used before we saw color).
