Great Currents Conference

I went to the Atlanta STC regional conference, Currents, this Saturday. As always, it was a great professional motivator and a chance to chat with some of our leading technical communicators. And Jean-Luc's final slide was right, I will never be able to look at a road sign the same way ever again. Yesterday on my way to the airport, I saw one of Jean-Luc's favorites:

State Law
STOP
Yield to pedestrian in crosswalk

Jean-Luc's point is that it is strange that we need to be told to do this, as if we would have hit them otherwise, and that we must be told it's the law (as opposed to a guideline, I guess.) Jean-Luc forgets that we are the culture that created the video game Death Race 2000 where you get points for hitting pedestrians.

The reason I was going to the airport is that I am in Portland, Oregon, this week for the WritersUA conference. First Currents and now WritersUA! I'll try to post on the conference this week.

One more thing, on the Portland light rail, nobody checks to see if you bought a ticket. It's the honor system. Kind of a nice contrast to "No running over pedestrians or else we'll give you a ticket."