Clarification: it depends what you mean by 'windows experience' - are you referring to (a) writing kernel level WDM P&P drivers, (b)administrating an extensive windows network or (c) changing a subheading style in Word?
(a) I'm your man (b) I can hold my own (c) I break out in a cold sweat and run screaming. There are some things that man* was not meant to know.
* 'man' as in 'mankind', in the absence of some more gender neutral term springing to mind
Hmm, dunno. I was looking for a nice rounded cliche, really. 'Man' in this context is an abbreviation of 'Mankind', which is arguably an abbreviation of Humankind, so I felt that would do. Explicitly writing the full form seems to me somewhat acoustically/visually clunky. Humanity works slightly better, but I guess I'd rather go for an entirely different and unpolluted aphorism. Perhaps something Quatermassian ("The horror! The horror!")? That would certainly sum up my relationship with MS Word very nicely...
It's crazy, isn't it. I'm doing some maintenance work on smartphone pocketpc driver code at the moment (including registry access, as it happens) and I'm like a small puppy on speed: zap that class - KAPOW!; rewrite this data structure - SHAZAM!; EWWW - *really* don't like the way those build options are defined, let's tear them down and do them properly - WOOSH!; etc. Then in a few days I'm going to have to write the associated design document, and I just know I'll spend 2 hours trying to get one line of text into the right font and indentation and be in serious danger of defenestrating my pc out of sheer frustration. Duh.
Points taken about "Things no gender-neutral-human-personage was meant to know". Lovecraft just wouldn't have been the same.
On the docs front, may I suggest DocBook? Semantic markup rules.
Admittedly there's a bit of a learning curve, but you can forget about the presentation until you're (nearly) finished, and then generate PDF, HTML, or whatever. Then have hassles about the presentation.
There are, of course, other markup dialects, both XML-based and not. But I'm sure you know all this, and are only using Word because it's there. Given that, you could always get the content down in a text editor, and import it into Word and add the formatting later.
Sadly the vast bulk of documentation I do gets delivered to a diverse set of customers, often using their own templates. Trying to persuade them all to adopt non-word anything would be somewhat akin to drinking a pan-galactic gargle blaster, except without the lemon.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 06:56 am (UTC)(a) I'm your man
(b) I can hold my own
(c) I break out in a cold sweat and run screaming. There are some things that man* was not meant to know.
* 'man' as in 'mankind', in the absence of some more gender neutral term springing to mind
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 07:45 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 08:10 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 08:57 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 09:49 am (UTC)Then in a few days I'm going to have to write the associated design document, and I just know I'll spend 2 hours trying to get one line of text into the right font and indentation and be in serious danger of defenestrating my pc out of sheer frustration. Duh.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 01:53 am (UTC)On the docs front, may I suggest DocBook? Semantic markup rules.
Admittedly there's a bit of a learning curve, but you can forget about the presentation until you're (nearly) finished, and then generate PDF, HTML, or whatever. Then have hassles about the presentation.
There are, of course, other markup dialects, both XML-based and not. But I'm sure you know all this, and are only using Word because it's there. Given that, you could always get the content down in a text editor, and import it into Word and add the formatting later.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 02:07 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 11:42 am (UTC)