{"id":2440,"date":"2002-06-20T17:21:14","date_gmt":"2002-06-20T22:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=2440"},"modified":"2002-06-20T17:21:14","modified_gmt":"2002-06-20T22:21:14","slug":"the_saga_of_thr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/06\/20\/the_saga_of_thr.html","title":{"rendered":"The Saga of Three-Star Dave!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now it can be told … again!<\/i><\/p>\n

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’see, everyone on the Internet has a sig line. This has faded — slightly — 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’s 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 …<\/p>\n

*** Dave Hill
\n*** dhill@pas01.mycompany.com
\n*** “Reality takes its toll …
\n*** … please have exact change.”<\/p>\n

And so it went.<\/p>\n

And eventually I was typing “*** Dave” 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.<\/i><\/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

(This is a repeat of a post from last October<\/a>, reprinted here so that I can link to it from the Archives page.)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now it can be told … again! Back in the dim, dusty, dark ages of my life, along about Summer 1994, my company got access to the Internet via e-mail….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":956,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2001\/10\/30\/the_saga_of_thr.html","url_meta":{"origin":2440,"position":0},"title":"The Saga of Three-Star Dave","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 30-Oct-01 6:24pm","format":false,"excerpt":"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...","rel":"","context":"In "Job Jollies"","block_context":{"text":"Job Jollies","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/job-jollies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":980,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2001\/10\/28\/whats_in_a_name.html","url_meta":{"origin":2440,"position":1},"title":"What’s in a name?","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 28-Oct-01 6:47pm","format":false,"excerpt":"While I've used the davehillblog47 name here since the beginning, I've also used the window title \"***Dave Does the Blog\". 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Hill\". \u00a0Maybe that's why people think I'm smart.\ufeff Middle initials are pretentious \u2014 but you should be using one anyway\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10651,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/12\/04\/signature_lines.html","url_meta":{"origin":2440,"position":3},"title":"Signature lines","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 4-Dec-06 6:38am","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the unexpected bonuses of the Christmas shopping season: new sig lines. Amidst the many thousands of t-shirts showing up in various catalogs, there tend to be a few...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":38337,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/19\/this-is-captain-spaulding-sig.html","url_meta":{"origin":2440,"position":4},"title":"This is Captain Spaulding, sig…","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 19-Jul-13 3:03pm","format":false,"excerpt":"This is Captain Spaulding, signing off! #hooray #hooray #hooray","rel":"","context":"In "~Tweets"","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":38220,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/posted-from-my-computer.html","url_meta":{"origin":2440,"position":5},"title":""Posted from my Computer"","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 8-Jul-13 5:35pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Net-net, I'm not a fan of the posted\/sent from my phone\/iPhone\/tablet sig lines. \u00a0I understand them -- heck, I've used them, long ago. \u00a0The point (at least my point) is to apologize for any weirdness of formatting or spelling lapses.But phone\/tablet email, etc., is so common now, that I think\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"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=2440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}