Go Back   IceInSpace > General Astronomy > General Chat

Reply
 
Thread Tools Rate Thread
  #1  
Old 06-03-2010, 12:21 AM
Waxing_Gibbous's Avatar
Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)
Grumpy Old Man-Child

Waxing_Gibbous is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: South Gippsland
Posts: 1,768
"MSWord Baffles Boffin"

Until recently, my father-in-law was a research Physicist at CSIRO.
His main area of expertise is X-Rays and stuff to do with X-Rays, but he's pretty much a polymath.
His last project was to develop the alloys used in the all conquering Ferrari nad Mercedes F1 engines. He quite literally did the calcs on butcher's paper.
He has loads of "publish".
He has so much cred that, if he wants a vacation he just phones or e-mails some Uni. or Institute, and after some chit-chat slips in "I'd love to visit but........."
And they pay his way. He recently weedled 3 weeks in the US courtesy of Lawrence Livermore and has managed to con CERN into a month in Europe this summer.
He usually writes his own applications and some gaming company in Japan just paid him a fistful of Yen for some algorithm or other.

I only just manged a "Desmond" in PPE and the only thing I've had published lately was a letter in the Age "Green Guide".

So it came as something of a shock when he asked me to retrieve some MSWord documents for him off his new Vista Laptop. I tried all the usual suspects and even did a "Google Desktop" search. Burrowed down through the registry and double-scanned for worms, viruses, trojans, bots etc. Nada.
"Yes" he was positive he'd saved them. "No" he hadn't re-installed the OS or re-formatted the HDD. Was I an idiot? "Of course" he didn't get it near a huge magnet!
So I was stumped.
Miffed, he wrote a letter to Redmond complaining of their shoddy product.
He appended the the letter "dot complaint dot MS"
"What're you doing?".
"I'm adding a file appendage". (Idiot who married my daughter).
"But that's not a valid file extension" I observed
"What do you mean?" he asked... and I went on and explained the conventions for MS file extensions.
"Oh". he said "Oh".
"Whyyyyy?" "What've YOU been labelling them?
"Well I save them with my own extensions - Like ".sum" for summary or ".for" for formula , ".dat" of course for "data" etc. etc.

A good belly laugh and some hours later and I managed to retrieve his files.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 06-03-2010, 10:58 AM
DiamondDust's Avatar
DiamondDust (Ingrid)
One day.......

DiamondDust is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Woodford, Qld
Posts: 79
Take a bow.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old 06-03-2010, 11:11 AM
Jen's Avatar
Jen
Moving to Pandora

Jen is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Swan Hill
Posts: 7,102
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Old 06-03-2010, 07:54 PM
ngcles's Avatar
ngcles
The Observologist

ngcles is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Billimari, NSW Central West
Posts: 1,664
Microsoft Word according to Douglas Adams

Hi Peter & All,

If you enjoyed that tale of frustration, you will also very much enjoy this one by one of my favourite writers Douglas Adams.

M.S word is nowadays soooo much better, less convoluted and user friendly than some (most) of the early versions. As I've done a bit of writing in various capacities over the last 20-odd years, I have enjoyed my share of Douglas' miseries ...

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~magi/personal...Macintosh.html


Best,

Les
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Old 06-03-2010, 09:55 PM
White Rabbit's Avatar
White Rabbit
Space Cadet

White Rabbit is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Sydney
Posts: 1,411
Do your father a favor then and hide extensions of known file types.

Open "my computer/tools/folder options/view" and check "hide extensions of known file types" that way you cant "make your own extension".

Some people, myself included, know just enough to be dangerous lol

Reply With Quote
  #6  
Old 06-03-2010, 11:46 PM
Waxing_Gibbous's Avatar
Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)
Grumpy Old Man-Child

Waxing_Gibbous is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: South Gippsland
Posts: 1,768
ng,
Most amusing .
I actually liked whatever version of Word came with 3.1.1.. And Aldus Pagemaker.
I've got saved copies of both in case one day Windows ***** simply crashes under it's own weight.
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Old 08-03-2010, 10:40 PM
AstralTraveller's Avatar
AstralTraveller (David)
Registered User

AstralTraveller is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Wollongong
Posts: 3,819
Back in the Win 3.1.1 days with its 8.3 character file name restrictions I used different extensions to divide up different sets of docs. This is a very great no no in the general computing world but in those days of very small computers with very few apps and no internet connection it worked quite well. Of course I knew how to determine what extensions were taken and how to associate an extension with an app so I never lost a file. So you father-in-law may not be so silly. Certainly no sillier then me!!
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Old 09-03-2010, 01:27 AM
Waxing_Gibbous's Avatar
Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)
Grumpy Old Man-Child

Waxing_Gibbous is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: South Gippsland
Posts: 1,768
Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller View Post
Back in the Win 3.1.1 days with its 8.3 character file name restrictions I used different extensions to divide up different sets of docs. This is a very great no no in the general computing world but in those days of very small computers with very few apps and no internet connection it worked quite well. Of course I knew how to determine what extensions were taken and how to associate an extension with an app so I never lost a file. So you father-in-law may not be so silly. Certainly no sillier then me!!


Did the same thing! Had to get one of the IT guys to help, bit it worked a treat. There was some kind of backdoor in MSDOS that allowed you to carry this off, but that was 17 years ago (OMG!!!) and I can't remember the pathway.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Rate This Thread
Rate This Thread:

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +10. The time is now 07:27 AM.

Powered by vBulletin Version 3.8.7 | Copyright ©2000 - 2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Advertisement
Bintel
Advertisement