When I'm not writing about computers for free on the internet, I actually work with computers (for money). Most of what I do involves doing stuff with computers directly, but sometimes I have to talk to people before I can start with the computer-stuff. That can involve convincing people that my colleagues and I actually know what we are doing or planning projects with other people. With both of these tasks I've found that drawing pictures can be very helpful. These are special types of pictures - called work flows or network typologies. Here's a really basic example: Tree Topology, by Tsingha02 The idea is taking some very complicated ideas about the relationships between computers and applications and putting them into very basic visual representations. Particularly for projects involving large numbers of servers, this sort of visualization is critical to understand what is going on. Despite how critical this sort of thing is to working with computers, there is ...