Continuing my reaquantiance with Windows AKA Hell, I was graced with two dueling quests. The first was to style a document in Word and the second was to email a couple files. Each case ended successfully with a reboot back into Linux AKA Purgatory. So what exactly is my tale? Well...

The first involved getting a document formatted with as little work as possible to look like the following in Word:

1. Header

1.1. Subheader

1.2. Another

• Some text
• More text

2. Another header

Using Word's styles got no where near that. The subheadings couldn't keep their numbers straight. I wanted "3.1" for example but got "1" instead. I nearly had it but then Word decided I shouldn't be able to modify the outline style I selected any longer. After contemplating doing things by hand, I said "screw it" and rebooted. OpenOffice saved the day and I praised God for it because it can actually do styles, even if it can't position the cursor correctly with every font.

The second quest was to send an email with two attachments. One of the attachments needed to be sent as an encrypted ZIP file. I wish the reciepient had PGP/GPG available, because it could have saved me some trouble. I easily got the file encrypted in WinZip, but sending it was a whole other story.

I wrote that email at least five times before getting it sent. Every attempt in Thunderbird would stop at 40% with zero blinking on the dialup status icon. So I would cancel it and loose the email. I did that a couple of times before trying Outlook. No go there. It apparently failed to make use of my SMTP server's custom port. So I scrapped that and tried to SCP and FTP those files to my shell account so I could use Pine. No go there either. Filezilla would get a little uploaded and crap out.

So I said another "screw it" and rebooted. I launch Thunderbird, punch in my email from long-term memory, add the attachments, and click send. Whoa and behold it worked!!

So after much stress Linux saved my day on two occasions. I can only wonder how a company can get away charging $100 for software that only half works half the time.