Although I make my living (in part) by writing about technology, my training is admittedly strong on writing but weak on technology. Any tech skills I possess come from my own keen interest in learning about the topic, my own ferocious pursuit of answers when I've known IT was wrong, and my own stubborn commitment to figuring stuff out myself.

My training in literature serves me well in the job, because even if I come across a tool that boasts some sort of "WOW" but makes me go "WTF" I can usually work my way through the website, documentation, or press release. Thanks to critical literacy skills, I can still have some inkling as to what's going on. Such is the beauty of the whole subject/verb/adverb/direct object/preposition/indirect object sentence construction, I'd wager.

But comprehending technology is only part of the gig. It's writing about it that I often find the most challenging, not because I don't understand (admittedly, I don't always) but because it absolutely kills me as a writer to not have access to a rich and diverse vocabulary with which to explain things.

An example: Back in April, I interviewed Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer about his company's release of a new Twitter dataset. "Dataset." I used that word nine goddamn times in that story. I could not, for the life of me, think of a synonym.

I need a tech blogger thesaurus, and I wonder if I'm the only one. I need to be sure that if I find using "object" five times in a story unacceptable (I did that tonight) and I want to use another word instead, that I can use "data" or "folder" or "storage stuff" instead and not be completely wrong.

Oh, I realize that most blog readers don't give a hoot if I can't find an adequate or interesting alternative to "forking," "platform," or "backend." It's my own literary madness and perfection, but hey, I'm a writer. It's my job.