Very frustrating evening here. Had one of those "oh, heck, I should save this since I've put so much effort into it" moments, you know the ones. You're sure the software is supposed to be doing a backup in the background, but still, you don't want to rely on that.

Oh well, hit save, hunt around for the OpenOffice.org Oasis format. What the heck, it's not there. Well, just scroll through the list of formats with pageup/pagedown and find it. Except that seems to hang the entire X event loop in some deep-down fundamental way. Of course, I could have just accepted the swx format, instead I lost something like two hours of work as I killed the whole X server and restarted.

The reason I couldn't find the format is that the installed OOo is actually the 1.x version, instead of the 2.x version I'd assumed. 2.x just went final today, but I'd thought I was running a late beta already. Sigh.

The worst part, as everyone knows, is that it's my own fault. You should never trust a computer. They are out to get us. Every second of every day they are plotting against us. Some people are smart and run SETI screensavers to keep them occupied when they're not being used, but for most of the day they are sitting there, waiting for our keystrokes and plotting ingenious ways to plausibly "forget" them at some point in the future.

Anyway, having been burned I took an hour off to eat dinner and calm the rage. I'm now installing OOo v2.0, and I guess I'll use it to write the proposal. Thunderbird is having problems with locks on the IMAP folders again, so I don't trust it as a composing environment at the moment.