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My new column on MSDN:
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.

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