Document author: Jean-Luc Picard

For years, whenever I installed a new piece of software that asked me for my name and organization, I typed in "Jean-Luc Picard" and "United Federation of Planets," respectively. It was a lark, really, although a part of me was reluctant to put in my real name for software that had, ahem, fallen into my hands off the back of a truck.

I can't remember the last time I did this, but evidence of it still pops up occasionally and gives me a laugh. Just today I went looking for my e-mail signature file, and when I found it, the author was listed as "Jean-Luc Picard." Heh.

Lately this became a smallish problem, as I've begun using Word's in-document comments feature when working on the final drafts of a manuscript with editor Liz. Clever program that it is, Word goes searching in the information you entered during the install, and tags your comments with whatever name it finds. My initial comments were, of course, tagged as the comments of Jean-Luc Picard. Not wanting the good captain's comments all over my manuscript, I made a couple of changes and "Alan Gratz" became the author. Just on that document, at least. :-)

As a default too, whenever I have to enter an e-mail address on some silly site that isn't going to e-mail me for confirmation, I put in picard@uss.enterprise.com.