Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes.

I write everything in TextPad first, saving as I go with Control-S to the appropriate directory using the date & time in the file name. I like to work full screen in large letters and I love lime green on black.

I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons). Seems like I'm the only one who has a record of anything because of my practice.

I operate under the assumption that anything free will go away at some point. I plan on moving somewhere else with my data. Also, it's really easy to find anything on my hard disk.

A little background:

Years ago, I found my best friend from college and we started to exchange emails. I emailed him a trivia quiz with 20 questions. He later told me that he was laughing like crazy while he answered them for the next hour. His wife called him when he was on Question #19. By the time he returned, his computer had crashed and he lost everything. (This was obviously pre-Gmail.) Now we'll never know what he answered.

I don't know what will be important later, so I'll never let anything like that ever happen to me.

I'm pleased it works for you.

I'm gently surprised you haven't created a more automatic solution. Something that's autosaving (with a timestamp in the name) every X seconds, perhaps. Something that allows you to enter text direct to the browser text field but still saves a copy for you.

I'm sure a many people would like to automatically capture everything they type and have it saved, but would not have the discipline to copy and paste.

But, as I say, if it works for you that's all you need.

Years ago, when computers were more crash-prone and and autosave wasn't yet a feature in MS Word, I ran a keylogger on my own computer for just this reason. On several occasions, it saved me from having to rewrite multiple pages of school assignments I would have otherwise lost due to crashes.

I like Microsoft's OneNote for this because it removes the saving/naming from the workflow, and it has a decent search.

<i>I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons).</i>

Isn't this kinda weird? How exactly is he operating his business, such that needs to leave absolutely no paper trail?

You can surround your text in asterisks to achieve italicization.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Thanks!

Do you sincerely think that everything you (or anyone) write on sites like this is worth saving for later? I don't think so. 99.99% of comments are inane and worth 0 (including mine).

What do you do with those texts? Reading them back months later and say "oh, what a sharp mind I have"? And what about the context (other's messages you answer to or that answer yours)? Do you also save it? Are also as worthly as yours?

I'm really surprised somebody does this.

Funny you should ask that, of Ed in particular.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564099

Of course, you are welcome to judge it as simple ego-stroking or whatever, but quite a few people would disagree.

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