Logophobia

Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said that cutting the PBS subsidy from the federal budget was an act akin to deleting text files on a 500GB hard drive.
I just dug out an old 128MB flash drive I bought about ten years ago, and even with a few photos on it, barely 30MB has been used. The myriad of text files on it are probably not even a full megabyte.
I've been using DeviantART's Sta.sh Writer for the novella I'm working on, and it had been great up until just today, when I learned how utterly impractical it is. I remember writing something on an old Blackberry, a really terrible freeverse poem about nature vs. nurture, and having to open a new memo because more than a few hundred words threw its program into a tizzy. Before that, when I was writing  something on my old Mac in Simpletext, I had to split the story up into different files because the program couldn't handle a text file bigger than 12KB. I'm sure that's fine for an essay for middle school or even high school, but it seems monstrously unfair to anyone who wants to write anything longer. Yes, I can use another program, but why this aversion to large text files? Are people that afraid of novels?
Anyway, in completing a chapter just today, Sta.sh began showing me a bizarre and downright terrifying error message:

Someone else has edited this draft. 

Sta.sh is supposed to work like Google Drive in that the only people who can see your work are people with the URL for that particular file. There is always the possibility that someone could guess the URL possibly by typing random characters, the chances are astronomical to the point that a state lottery looks like a coin flip. As such, seeing this message stare back at me was horrifying; it meant someone was hacking my account. Worse yet, the view figures for the page reflected someone besides myself having seen the page once that day. I quickly went to my DeviantART profile and logged out of all other sessions, then logging out of the current one, just to be safe. Luckily, no other sessions that I didn't recognize showed up. I know that sometimes I get logged out of DeviantART and that my viewing figures will reflect this, so Sta.sh was no different. That said, I wasn't logged out, and nothing indicating a lapse revealed itself.
I put the error message in a search and found out, quite luckily, that this was not uncommon, with instances going back to the earliest months of the year. Apparently, if word of mouth is to be believed, Sta.sh Writer is not very fond of files reaching an excess of 64KB in size. This was a relief to hear, and it even matched my own data. When I'd finish writing something in Sta.sh, I'd copy and paste the text into another word program (namely Evernote and LibreOffice) for safekeeping. This is the only time I can see how big a file is, and sure enough it's been reaching the 64 mark. All this really means is that I have to move operations directly into one of the other word program, which isn't all that big of a problem, but there is a worry. It's one of those quirky little idiosyncratic behaviors that we're all prone to in some way, shape, or form.
When you work with a typewriter, even a more modern one with an LCD screen showing your first few sentences before committing them to paper (a buffer, of sorts), you have to think ahead, because you can't really go back. There's white-out and even some correct keys on certain models, but these feel like cheating, and often make weird noises or smell terribly, and just generally make your printed work look ragged and unrefined. You find yourself really mulling over every sentence before you put anything down. It's much the same for ink and paper; that's why essay questions on exams are often so taxing. Word processors fix a number of these problems, but have a few of their own added to the mix, if a little more intangible and hard to relate to in describing. You get used to how a word program works, the way it's laid out, the way the auto-save works, how the spell check picks up on certain quirks in your writing, and having to shift from one to the other can be very jarring, even affecting the way you write. Moving from a typewriter to a word processor means you can afford a few mistakes, but that can breed bad habits as well as hurting the quality of your sentences now that you're no longer turning each over in your head before putting fingers to keys.
I don't have much experience with LibreOffice, and I didn't get much use out of OpenOffice's writer, so a lot of its finer and innermost workings elude me. The biggest one is auto-save, something I've gotten far too spoiled by in recent years. I can remember writing a story on my old Mac IIsi, many years ago when I was still getting the hang of typing. I got into a real groove with what I was writing, staring down at the keys while frantically tapping away at them like Schroeder at his piano, only to look up and see that nothing I'd written made it to the screen. The program had frozen, and I was too busy looking down to see it. I was completely devastated, almost to tears. I knew right away that even if I could resume working right away (which I couldn't because I had to force quit the program and wait for it to boot up again), I'd never write exactly what I'd written before. Maybe that would have been for the best, giving me a chance to think about what I'd written a little more, but it was still a huge setback. Even now, I get nervous over similar problems with more modern programs, even ones with good auto-save, and find myself prone to small panic attacks when I get an error message telling me the sync operation has failed (even if it'll work perfectly well the next time it tries).
Maybe I just worry too much, but this is one of those things about working with text that haunts me when I write, more so than file formats and typesetting or anything like that. It's just so disconcerting that for all our technology, typewriters still hold so much superiority on account of their physicality and tangibility.

Too tired for full post.

Addendum to title: 

OR: Another Casualty of My Linux Loyalty. 

Well, OpenOffice briefly disappointed me, but thanks to some wonderful people at Yahoo! Answers, I was able to work around it and publish my short story to its own page. I'll post a full entry later on the unbelievable headache I encountered when simply trying to copy and paste text from one file into another. 

Here's the link to the story: http://matsugawa.freeservers.com/mjaladyhorse.html. 

It's still got a few formatting issues, but like I said, I'm too tired to correct it right now. 

Another casualty of my Linux loyalty.

I was reading about the Unix Philosophy on Wikipedia, and one of its stipulations toward good program design is to store data in flat text files. Sounds simple enough, but it's surprising (or rather, it's not surprising given how programmers actually are) how complex that sort of thing can actually get. 

People like to think Microsoft Works is an oxymoron. I disagree as I think it's one of the most competent word processors I've used since Appleworks on my old iMac. It's certainly better than feature-bloated Microsoft Word with its triple-figure price tag and myriad of features I honestly want someone to justify the need for to me. Seriously, what perilous problem was laid to rest by the onset of the latest version of MSWord? What award-winning novelist and finally got past his writer's block and completed his life's work? What disease was cured? 

Anyway, I'd written some stuff in Microsoft Works and, without giving it that much thought, simply saved the files as "Works Documents" which didn't seem like a proprietary format at the time, much less a proprietary format that would end up giving me such a headache later. They were put on a flash drive and then basically left in a drawer for a few months. During those few months, I decided I'd had it with Windows and Macintosh and went the Linux route. I'd traded in Microsoft Works and Appleworks for OpenOffice, which so far seemed able to do anything the others could do... or so I thought. 

Going in, there was no reason to assume converting the files would be such a problem, I'd written documents in Microsoft Word that I'd open in Appleworks without so much as a hitch. Earlier I'd written papers in MacWrite II before bringing them to Wordperfect which would then be brought to Appleworks. Sure, there might be a small issue with the formatting of the text (a paragraph suddenly not indented, double-spacing becoming single-spacing, and the like), but the point was every single word was there just like before. 

This time, however, when I tried to open the Works documents under Open Office's Writer, the words were not there. Nothing was there. It could not open the file. Let's think about that: a word processor could not even begin to try and open a document, which was just words on pages, written by another word processor. At first I thought this was just some sort of Microsoft/Linux barrier, a kind of "migration deterrent" from Big MS to keep Little L out of its clubhouse, so I took the file to my roommate's computer. She didn't have MSWord or even Microsoft Works, but she did have Notepad and Wordpad. Strangely, the exact same thing happened; the MSWorks file could not be interpreted in any way, shape, or form by anything other than MSWorks (and possibly MSWord). Like I've said before, there wasn't anything even all that special about these documents, they were simply text, no pictures, no boxes, no graphs, no columns, no page numbers, no headers or footers, no nothing. All I could think was, "What's so special about these files that they need their own special format?!" 

I then thought to myself, as I often do in these situations, "I can't possibly be the only one who's run into this problem. There has to be something I'm missing besides the possibility that I would have to either go back to Windows or at least present my roommate with the gift of MSWorks (which she might not have actually minded because she hated Notepad and Wordpad). There has to be a way to convert files like this." I did some searching and while I was relieved I found a solution (and a free one, I might add), I was still incredibly annoyed at how utterly convoluted the solution really was. 

I found a website that gave me the option to upload a file and select the format I wanted to change it to. It was originally intended for reformatting picture files (.png, .bmp, .tif, that sort of thing) into JPEGs, but it could also handle a wide variety of text files. Here's the annoyance: after uploading my file, rather than simply download it again from the site (or at least displaying it in the browser window so I could just copy and paste or save as an HTML document), I had to give an e-mail address for them to send the converted file to. If that sounds petty, hang on because I haven't actually gotten to the annoying part yet. When I checked my e-mail and found the message from the conversion service, I was baffled and (here it is) annoyed that instead of the converted file being presented to me as an attachment in the message, a link in the body of the message took me to back to the original site and THEN began the download, at which I said, "Why e-mail me a link to the same place I could have just downloaded it from after uploading in the first place?" and went on to wonder what disease THIS system cured with its over-engineering. I was so flustered by the experience that when I stumbled across a forum discussion asking what man's greatest accomplishment was, I proclaimed with full conviction: PAPER! 

Take that, proprietary file formats! 

But the important thing is, I got the file opened in Open Office's Writer and I'm now finishing what I started. I'll post the link when it's done. It's a little work of fiction.