My new column on MSDN
27 Oct 2003

Ah, it's nice to see my new column online on the MSDN website. 

Now that the content is finally "live", I need to tell a story.  It's embarrassing, but it will be much better if I tell this story myself, rather than having everybody hear it from Chris Sells:

I've never minded being called a "nerd" or a "geek".  These terms of distinction carry a certain positive connotation.  In contrast, the word "dork" is a term I prefer not to wear unless I truly deserve it.

Chris contacted me several months ago and asked me to write a column for his new Longhorn Developer Center on MSDN.  I was flattered and I accepted.  We talked about details of the column and it all seemed easy enough.  He said each installment of the column needed to be "of length 2K-4K".  No problem.

My first deadline was September 15th.  I've never written professionally with real deadlines and editors, so I wrote my draft well in advance.  It was a little tricky, since these columns needed to be quite a bit shorter than the stuff I write on my weblog.  The weekend before the deadline, I spent a whole bunch of time tightening the prose to get it under the 4K limit.  My final draft was 3,985 bytes -- plenty of room to spare.

I submitted my column to Chris and he seemed shocked.  He couldn't understand why my draft was so much shorter than the minimum.

I stared at the screen for a moment, completely perplexed.  And then I realized, when Chris said "2K-4K", the unit of measurement was words, not bytes.  I thought it was a bit odd to measure written prose in bytes, but it never occurred to me that he meant anything else. 

On that particular day, I have to admit, I was a dork.