Remember how I had to go to Finland for my keyboard, because I use a modified Dvorak that could not be generated on my American keyboard? I moved to the Finnish keyboard and reconfigured that, thanks to my wife's expertise. Well, I got Smartkey for DOS, but when I invoked the Finnish keyboard it glitched. I had to strike each key twice to make it register. My wife had no such problem. It turned out, after trial and error, that this is a phenomenon that occurs only in DOS, with the Finnish keyboard, with Smartkey. Eliminate any one of those three, and things are normal. I don't know why this effect exists, and doubt that anyone else does; I'm the only one ornery enough to go to Finland just to get my capital V's and W's. "You know," I told my wife, "the Swedish keyboard is identical to the Finnish keyboard, except for some markings on the surfaces of the physical keys that would have no bearing on this. But, just in case—'' And would you believe, the interference was gone on the Swedish keyboard.

Everything worked perfectly. Thus I moved from Finland to Sweden, as well as from CP/M to MS-DOS.

I still needed a word-processing program for DOS. I liked the one I had in CP/M, Edward, that enabled me to call up as many as fourteen different files at once, and allowed me to put my functions wherever I wished. I refused to give up those features. So I hired the proprietor to customize Edward for me in MS-DOS. It cost about a thousand dollars, and there were a number of glitches to debug, but I got it. I was on my way in DOS!

Now a diversion; don't worry, it does, deviously, connect.

At the end of OctOgre I attended the local science fiction convention, NECRONOMICON, as a Guest of Honor. I had been there three years before, and this time their other GOH was Fred Pohl, a leading figure in the genre. So I arranged to interview him for an audience, and really looked forward to it, because I had some most provocative questions to which I knew he had excellent answers. But Satan struck: Fred's wife had a heart attack, and Fred had to cancel just one week before the convention. Thus the disappointed fans had to settle for just me.

Oh, they were nice enough about it, but it was too bad.

At that convention my daughter Penny and I had the pleasure of taking Andre Norton and her associate Ingrid Zeirhut to lunch. Penny and I and Ingrid are vegetarians; Andre loves cats and I hate cats (but cats love me), so it was interesting, especially when we shared a panel later.

I was on several panels, and on one of them was Lois Wickstrom, co-editor of a small press magazine, PANDORA. I thought nothing of it until in casual conversation I learned that she was the other local writer who uses the Dvorak keyboard. Immediately we were comparing notes. I'm on the DEC Rainbow computer; she is on an IBM