Editor’s Note: Tom Johnson shows up at the top of any Tech Comm Influencers list for good reasons: He’s a talented pro who’s working in the trenches; he writes one of the top blogs in the industry, I’d Rather Be Writing; and he’s one of the good guys. I asked him to provide a wish list of what Santa should bring him in the new year. Here’s his eye-opening, entertaining, and thought-provoking list.
When Connie invited me to contribute a wish list for Santa for a Christmas-themed post on Techwhirl.com, I thought, hmmm, I have nothing to say on the topic. I don’t often make wish lists or expect anything from anyone. In fact, I’m not a very good gift giver either, and Christmas isn’t my favorite holiday.
But now that I’ve been thinking about a wish list, I’ve found there are lots of things I want. Yes, I’m getting greedy this year and am not ashamed about a full-on, lengthy, detailed, and nearly-impossible-to-fulfill wish list for Santa.
I started jotting down ideas on paper and found the list growing and growing. Santa, if you’re listening out there, find it in your heart to fulfill as many wishes as you can.
My 2014 wish list (in no particular order)
- A free alternative to Akismet that works
- Affordable housing in San Jose
- Free lunch every day at work, not just 3 days a week
- Goal tracking app that makes me realize my goals
- No buffering for Safari Flow when my cellular connection is weak
- A basket of unripe persimmons disguised as tomatoes for all my enemies
- Drupal and WordPress to merge into a new product called Worpul
- A ban on ties in favor of … stylish hats
- A meaningful and cool tattoo (discrete too)
- 45 degree morning weather (35 is too low)
- More wearable tech
- A light sky at 5pm
- Audio books on programming
- Ability to share code with syntax highlighting in Google Docs and comment on it in margins
- Clean import/export of HTML in Google Docs, with round-tripping into structured cloud storage site
- Board games specifically for technical writers
All tech comm conference sessions recorded and distributed freely as MP3 files- An inclination for fiction more than television
- A master noise level control volume in my home (which quiets my children)
- A motorcycle
- A cat
- A special superpower (I’m not really picky here, just something)
- A recharged life to my podfaded podcast
- Bike pant cuffs that don’t look dorky
- SEO rank for my site when someone searches for the term “technical writer”
- Easy nanny filters for all my home media devices
- The chance to see my blood in its original blue color
- Tracking devices for kids, with a findMyKid option
- Warm ocean water off the Northern California coast
- The ability to use < and > without a special syntax highlighter in HTML, just wrapped in code tags on a page
- The ability to work remotely permanently
- Google to bring back Google Reader with a huge apology to all bloggers
- Google to create wifi blimps throughout the sky
- Amazon to launch copter drones
- Drones to crash into Google wifi blimps, providing amusement out my window at work
- Google to acquire Feedly and then do nothing for 2 years and then sunset it
- A gory day like an ER doctor must have (or something to produce adrenaline)
- A desk of my own (in my 1,000 sq foot rented house)
- Time to finish all episodes of 4400
- The ability to cut my sleeping time in half without feeling tired (or resorting to caffeine)
- The opportunity to play a tech writing role in the zombie apocalypse
- Help authoring tools for Macs
- Total elimination of comment spam
- Powerful tech comm features built directly into Drupal 8
- An integration of Drupal 8 and DITA
- wysiwyg editors that don’t insert span tags willy nilly
- A computer virus targeted to CK Editor creators that adds <span style=”background-color: rgb(254, 254, 254)”> between every word of anything they write
- To be woken up in the morning by a harmless but cute rattling rattlesnake
- To live in the moment yet be in 2 parallel universes and have cognitive dual threading
- To dream in a code I haven’t yet learned
- To code a dream in order to learn
- Nanobyte pets
- Rotating and waterproof laser lights for my bike wheels
- The ability to move my eyes independently while recording video tutorials
- Someone to map out the next 25 years of my career
- Apples pre-injected with peanut butter
- Fat-free (and delicious) peanut butter
- The custom-built CMS tools from Google, Twitter, and Apple licensed as open source and shared freely
- The opportunity, at least once, to deliver help on WordPress with full server access
- An endless supply of Naked Green Machine juice smoothies
- Google Glass Ball (new product) — it will tell me my future revealed in randomly rotating Google search results
- Legal ownership of the Tom Johnson camping center
- A pet salamander (wearing a little hat) in a cage on my work desk
- Ability to integrate BuddyPress without adding 5 seconds of extra loading time on my site
- An ingeniously profitable online scheme that makes me a lot (read A LOT!) of money but doesn’t jeopardize my reputation
- A new color we (as humans) have never seen before
- Two things named after me — one bad, the other good
And that’s about it. I realize that Santa probably won’t bring me all of this in 2014, but one can dream.
Tom writes about all kinds of issues related to technical writing, and he ends up getting referenced in our Tech Writer This Week… a lot. Look for his new series of posts on the search engine optimization of help documentation. Contact him at tom@idratherbewriting.com.
