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.
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 ...
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.
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!!
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.
