But then there was WordPerfect. To this day it is my favorite Word Processor (that’s WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS). I taught classes on it while I was working on a CS degree. I had the 40 function keys memorized and even the F11 and F12 keys – when I had keyboards with F11 and F12.

Here’s the thing, WordPerfect was logical. There were three general categories of markup (codes) and those three categories, when added, went to specific places on the line (home back-arrow, home-home back-arrow, home-home-home back-arrow) and it was related to the scope of the thing. And you could see them with revel codes, Alt-F3. Sure it took a bit of learning but it was expert friendly.

At the same time that Ultima IV came out, I decided to write a book for one of the classes I taught. The first week some friends of mine and I finished Ultima IV – we did not stop playing, but played in shifts. I finished the outline that week. The next week I wrote the first version of a book. I still have one physical copy of that book.

I did this work (Ultima IV and WordPerfect) on my Leading Edge, 2 – 5.25” floppy drive system. The first version was about 170 pages, the final was around 350 pages. Printing took about 3 hours. 1 hour to merge the master document, update the TOC, generate the index, 2 hours to print on my HP DeskJet (the first one).

WordPerfect never crashed (4.2 was solid, 4.0 no so much), and I knew what the resulting print was going to look like before it printed. I groked it. I had lots of formatting, graphics (mostly had-drawn bitmaps), numbered items, tutorials, chapters, page numbers, you know, stuff.

In the mid 80’s I started using Microsoft Word. I didn’t like it then and to this day I do not like it. Anybody who has ever tried working with numbered lists across versions understands what I’m talking about (this feature worked perfectly in WordPerfect). I can get it to work. And I know that when to grab the hidden character at the end of a paragraph (or not) when copying – which leads to selecting paragraphs in a particular direction. I work to avoid using it as much as I can, which is getting better all the time.

I’m not a big fan of complex formatting simply because I have not found anything so clear as WordPerfect. The later versions didn’t do it for me.

I am a fan of using Wiki’s because part of the whole reason to use one is to keep away from messing around with formatting and get to writing.

Lately I’ve been learning CSS. It’s powerful. It’s also magic. Working with flow layouts reminds me of the grid-bag-layout of X fame (or was that Motif – certainly Java has one as well). I like what I can do with it.

I like that I can get the basic content looking decent and then when I’m in the mood, I can attempt to cast spells to make the stuff I’ve written look better. So far, I’m a rank amateur.

I probably should be spending more time re-learning JavaScript (which is a cool language – I love prototype-based languages – first one I used was Self). But I’ve been working on some tutorials for Ruby, one on practicing TDD and a few on BDD.

These are low-level. For example, I have not used the story tests of RSpec yet. That’s the next tutorial – I still have the second BDD tutorial to finish. I already have stories for the next tutorial, so writing story tests and working my way into a solution should be a blast.

If you’d like to have a look, check out: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/ruby.tutorials

These are works in progress!

To bring the train track back into a complete oval – we want the train to run after all – I came across something from James Martin (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DuplexBook.html) and it got me to thinking. In these tutorials, I have a lot of “sidebars” where I give a little more context. Those sidebars are scattered throughout.

In 2001 I took a writers workshop with Jerry Weinberg (http://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Communication.html) and in that workshop we had one exercise involving taking paragraphs from other people on various subjects and attempting to weave a common theme throughout.

Martin’s idea of a duplex book and Weinberg’s writing exercise led me to refactor all of those tutorials such that the sidebars are included files. This leads to a summary of all of the sidebars so far: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/ruby.sidebars

I think I’m going to take Martin’s message to heart and have 2-views into this material; the sidebars and the tutorials. I’m going to try that exercise I learned from Weinberg and see where it takes me.

How does this relate? As I was refactoring, I made sure to put a span around the titles so I could have consistent, and externally defined formatting in my CSS. So it’s loosely related. I’ve been working with spans and included files a bunch this week.

So what do you think? Is the name of this blog appropriate?

Goodnight!