I know it’s April Fool’s (still), but that’s got nothing to do with this article. Although it may turn out to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek (and I don’t know that yet, because it’s not written), it’s all true!

Periodically, I experience this drive — from some unknown source — to be famous, rather than infamous. One result of this drive is that from around the year 2000 to around 2003, I worked with a couple of publishers. One (Microsoft Press), you’ve probably never heard of. The other, The Coriolis Group, purveyors of Exam Cram and Exam Prep books, is now defunct; that is, they’re out of business, gone, passed on, hiding in Davy Jones’ locker, paid the debt which cancels all others, with most of their assets having been recycled. (Of course, one has to wonder how successful Que Publishing will be with it, when they’re too stupid to even create links for the series on their website.)

Anyway, in that time, I was the technical editor for a couple of books such as the semi-error-prone Windows 2000 Server Exam Cram.

While working with Microsoft Press, I pulled out of a project with the “author” Melissa Craft (Faster Smarter Network+ Certification) because the book is, frankly, not worth the trees that died to print it and the “author” was not interested in correcting her mistakes even after I quoted from such sources as Stevens, Comer and Perlman to show the error of her ways. (I did, incidentally, also work on a couple of fairly good books, one of which is pictured in this post!)

But that’s all beside the point.

Recently, I contacted the editor with whom I worked at Coriolis to ask about the permissibility of posting the chapter I wrote for the Migrating Windows NT4 to Windows 2000 Exam Prep (with CD!) on this blog. My desire was (is) to present an example of my professional writing. She responded by telling me that the contract I signed does not preclude my posting the chapter here and that, nevertheless, the fact that Coriolis is out-of-business caused the copyright to revert to the author. For this chapter, that’s me.

The chapter took me approximately 15 hours to write. I enjoyed it immensely. Glen Bergen of Microsoft Canada was terrific and I deeply appreciate the opportunity that both he and Hilary Long (the aforementioned editor) afforded me.

I was, incidentally, paid the princely sum of $1000.00. Heck, I don’t get paid a nickel to write for this blog!

Someday, I’ll create a permanent page/set-of-pages for the chapter. In the meanwhile, you can download this approximately-12-megabyte PDF file and read it here. (Remember! It’s 12 megabytes. Consider your link speed; download may be slow!)

I hope to return you to my regular vitriolic (but not meretricious!) political ramblings before the weekend.