Back in the dim, dusty, dark ages of my life, along about Summer 1994, my company got access to the Internet via e-mail. It was good timing, since I was seriously burnt-out from a six-month field assignment full of 18-hour days and bitter, hostile clients. I dove in like a drowning man to a swimming pool.<\/p>\n
But at the time, I had a problem. Y\u2019see, everyone on the Internet had a sig line. This has faded \u2014 slightly \u2014 at least in the circles I circle. But in those days, it seemed the bigger the sig line the better. Big, elaborate ASCII-art. Multiple boxes with names, addresses, pithy Blake\u2019s 7 quotes …<\/p>\n
Lots of which was obviously designed around an earlier era of fixed-pitch display fonts.<\/p>\n
So Dave needed a sig line. But nothing that would look goofy and ragged on the right when translated into Times Roman.<\/p>\n
Ever the imaginative graphics designer, I realized that a fixed, left-margin text border would look cool, and would translate into any font.<\/p>\n
So \u2026<\/p>\n
And so it went.<\/p>\n And eventually I was typing \u201c*** Dave\u201d enough that I was using it even in company e-mail (which, in those days, was still a minority of my traffic).<\/p>\n And now you know the rest of the story.<\/p>\n (Note that, properly speaking, there should be a space between the third asterisk and the capital D. In most display cases, though, like on the page title, I leave the space out, since, in those cases, that looks better. Irritatingly enough, though, Google ignores asterisks in its searches.)<\/p>\n Though sometimes being “Three-Star Dave” makes me feel like I should be a Holiday Inn, it’s a personal affectation I think I can live with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the dim, dusty, dark ages of my life, along about Summer 1994, my company got access to the Internet via e-mail. It was good timing, since I was seriously burnt-out from a six-month field assignment full of 18-hour days and bitter, hostile clients. I dove in like a drowning man to a swimming … Continue reading “Three Stars”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13841","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13844,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/about-me","url_meta":{"origin":13841,"position":0},"title":"About Me","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 20-Feb-09 10:15pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The Short Form Husband, father, writer, reader, gamer, diplomat, magpie, theist, civil libertarian, social justice warrior, techie, pointy-haired manager, traditionalist, Coloradoan, wordsmith, progressive, quotation collector, blogger, Team Oxford Comma, pedant, he\/him, nice guy. The Longer Form Husband of a wonderful wife, Margie. Father of faboo college student, James. IT corporate\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n*** Dave Hill
\n*** dhill@pas01.mycompany.com
\n*** \"Reality takes its toll ...
\n*** ... please have exact change.\"<\/code><\/p>\n