Back to work

I haven't done any work since before Christmas. In fact, I haven't sat down and done serious work since my laptop died (gick, yurbblle, plonk) somewhere around the 22 Dec.

I had to warm up a little bit today to get started.

Got a new computer (a pretty little Averatec that weighs four pounds even) AND loaded Microsoft Word on, AND all my Word documents, AND my favorites list. Even better, transferred my normal.dot which contains most of the mods I make to Word.

With Word ... it's about five hours work to track down and kill all the Word 'features', starting with the ulcer generating animated paperclip and ending with the idiotic 'smart quotes' and 'smart cut and paste'.

Transferring my normal.dot preserved nine-tenths of my lengthy, careful mods. My custom tool bar up top of the screen contains the icons I've chosen for the functions I actually use. My custom keyboard preferences do only what I need doing. No more weirdo Word garbage infesting the keyboard. Yeah!

That 'custom keyboard' is largely a matter of deleting the 800 blankity-blank inherent keystrokes that come set as standard with Word. I erase them all ... and then I don't accidentally hit control H or Alt M and start doing a bloody hanging indent or some other incomprehensible weirdness that takes an hour to figure out what it is and another half hour to turn it off. Then I add the two dozen key shortcuts I actually need.

There was still a little work to do on the new machine. This morning I cleaned up everything that didn't transfer with normal.dot. I went into 'Tools' and unchecked roughly ALL the boxes, everywhere. My laptop and I both sighed in relief.

I am still troubled by the weirdness that my single and double quotes do not spring into existence unless they are followed by a space. If you don't do a space immediately following the quote, it follows you down the sentence till you do a space and THEN it appears.
So bizarre.

This is a Weird Little Glitch that I do not remember every encountering before. Help has naught to say aneunt this. It does not appear as an item in any of the 'Tools' choices. I cannot imagine why any default would be set to do this or where this preference exists in the vast irresponsible and garbage-y complexity that is Word.
I'll see if I can find a Word complaint forum that deals with this.
(ed not ... I finally figured out it has something to do with my international character options and patched a fix.)

My extensive custom dictionary and my extensively customed autocorrect didn't make the transfer. I will try to find those files on my old computer. If not, they'll generate again. No big.

I'm not quite used to the placement of the keys on the Averatec yet. That too will come.

I generally pop the physical keys off CAPS LOCK and INSERT. I don't use these features, ever. And they are cuddled up close to, respectively, the SHIFT and DELETE keys, which I do use all the time. Haven't done my key poppin' yet, but I will. Will do.

In re writing ...played around, adding the internals to the suspense plot. Jess solves the problem ... step one ... step two ... and so on.