COMMAND ME, MY DARLING!

I don't know how, but somehow I wound up with a job writing documentation in Microsoft Word on a Windows box -- because I know UNIX. I don't get it.

I finished up my first day on the job and felt like a dork. The people are really nice, and the work is reasonable. What's frustrating is the damned Windoze environment. This company is on a budget, so I'm hesitant to ask for FrameMaker yet, but MS Word is the wrong tool for real documentation (sorry jhitchin).

I worked with two really nice and sharp young consultants from Minot, North Dakota. Oy. These guys didn't sound much like the movie "Fargo," but one of them did say he automatically tuned out the local regionalism when he saw the movie -- in Kentucky.

Anyhow, I am hoping they'll set me up so I can do much of my work from home -- not just so I can be around Lady, but because my home facilities are so much better. At work I'm using a PIII laptop that's configured so you can only use it right-handed because of where the trackpad is positioned, while at home I have a 21" monitor. All my systems have MS Word.

My first assignment is to plop in a cover page, print this baby to PDF, and post it to their documentation server. What I don't know how to do is get MS Word into PDF on Windows.

All day I kept wanting a command line. I don't do well with GUI interfaces where I have to do everything with the mouse. My right arm is numb from all the mousing.

The reason for the subject harkens back to my TOPS-20 days. At Columbia University we had a special version of the EXEC (the TOPS-20 equivalent of the UNIX shell) that let you define your own commands and change the system prompt. The other folks in the crowd that hung around the computer room had set custom prompts, and they spent a lot of time convincing me you weren't "cool" unless you did so.

Eventually I decided it would be fun to change my prompt, but I didn't know what to change it to. I did know I wanted to set up my computer to make me feel good when I logged in. I had already programmed it to give me an affirmation when I'd log in, but I wanted to carry that to the prompt. I was looking at my friends' prompts for their commands and sub-commands. To one side of me a friend had "COMMAND!" and "SUB-COMMAND!" To the other side my friend had "Darling!" and "Yes, dear?"

I decided to combine the two and came up with "COMMAND ME, MY DARLING!" AND "SUB-COMMAND ME, MY DEAR!"

Ah, for the days of command line interfaces....