My dad in a typical pose (explaining something).
My dad (1917-2005) had big plans for a series of memoirs and outlined them for me. This is where the names listed in Memoirs came from. The ones with real links are the ones that he was satisfied with AND that I had converted to HTML by the time he died. There are many others in less-than-finished condition that I really should get off my duff and edit into publishable shape. After all, I'm 74 and not going to live forever, myself.
The problem is compounded by my father's version of Version Control. Every time he edited a piece he would save it as a new file, but sometimes when he edited he would work from an older file and then save that changed version as a new file. He was also not consistent about the names he gave to the files, and since he continued to name files with the old MS-DOS convention of 8 characters for the name and 3 characters for the extension (8.3), the filenames tend to be fairly cryptic. They were mostly saved on 3.5" floppy disks (but some on Zip-disks of different types) so many of the files actually have the same names but with slightly different content. Also, many of his files were in WordPerfect format, so I have had to find and use a WP-to-Text conversion program to recover them (which FUBARs any embedded filedate information).
I have managed to recover copies of all his files from the 500 or so floppy disks he left behind. To get a "final" version, I need to collect all the files of any given memoir and run a DIFF program on each combination of two files (checking differences line by line or even character by character) to determine how he had changed the files. Eventually I have to guess at what he meant to say and finally convert it to HTML (which I do with a simple text editor (I really dislike the bloated HTML that results from WYSIWYG editors)). Needless to say this tends to get interrupted by the occasional bout of tears even though it's been 12 years since he passed. Memory can be overwhelming at times.
For my mom (1919-1999) there are many fewer files; she tended to edit and save in the same file. Also she just never planned (and started) nearly as many memoirs. A pity, since she had, and told, many family memories. (Some idiot son never thought to get them on tape.) There are a few, and I hope to get them converted to HTML someday as well.
