Mokka mit Schlag » 2005 » December

For a while I’d sort of vaguely noticed this little clipboard icon when pasting into Word from some other program or document, especially when copying out of a web page:

I mostly ignored it, and it seemed to go away without getting in my way. I just figured it was some symptom of Word featuritis, but one day when I was bored I clicked on it just to see what would happen, and am I glad I did. Hiding inside this unassuming little icon was a cure for one of my constant peeves when working with Word.

This lets me change the formatting of whatever I’m pasting in to match the target formatting. Alternately I can paste in as plain text with no formatting at all. This doesn’t matter a lot when I’m pasting in source code from BBEdit or Eclipse, but it’s hugely useful when I’m copying something out of a web page and pasting it into a book or article (with appropriate citation of course). This is major time saver for my workflow. If you’re tired of your copying web text and then having to carefully reapply formatting so all the styles and fonts match up, this little icon is a godsend. I’m not sure when Microsoft added this, but whenever they did I wish I’d realized what it did sooner. (Update: on the Mac this icon seems to have arrived with Word 2004; i.e. version 11.2. I’m not sure when or if it appeared on Windows.)

Nisus Writer 3.0 introduced discontiguous selection fifteen years ago. This is an unbelievably useful feature, but sadly still uncommon in most products. In recent years Microsoft Word finally caught up. However, the feature has been little advertised, and it’s easy to miss.

To make a discontiguous selection in Word 2002 and later on Windows, hold down the control key when dragging for the second and subsequent parts of the selection. On Mac Word X and later use the Command key instead.

You can now cut, copy, paste, apply styles to, spell check, word count, or otherwise operate on what you’ve selected.

Have you ever needed to reassert a style in Microsoft Word? For example, change all the paragraphs tagged with body back to the real body style. You can reapply the style to each paragraph manually, but that’s really painful especially since Word persists in getting this exactly backwards and making you confirm each change:

Instead you can make one quick global change with search and replace. Simply search for the style (no text) and replace it with itself:

Click “Replace All” and you’re done. the style will have been reapplied to all occurrences, whether that’s three or three hundred.

Something interesting happened in New York City this Christmas season: everyone started wishing each other “Happy Holidays”. In fact, I’d venture that “Happy Holidays” is outpacing “Merry Christmas” roughly 10-1.

This is a very recent development. Just last year I’d say that “Happy Holidays” was relatively unusual. You saw it on greeting cards and signs, but people didn’t say it to each other, not even here in Brooklyn, where roughly a quarter of the population is Jewish, and where menorahs are as common as Christmas trees.

Here’s what I think happened: all the brouhaha from Bill O’Reilly and other reactionary wingnuts about “Happy Holidays” actually got people to pay attention to their greetings for the first time; and when they did–Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, or anything else–they knew they didn’t want to be associated with those idiots. If the same mouth breathers that had argued for calling homosexuals “queers” instead of “gays” and blacks “negroes” instead of “African-Americans” were now incensed about saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, then “Happy Holidays” had got to be the thing decent people say to each other.

So Happy Holidays to everyone, Bill O’Reilly included, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Makar Sankranti, or anything else. Here’s wishing you a wonderful 2006!

Like most blogs that enable comments, this one has attracted its share of spam. Interestingly I’ve noticed that most of these comment spams start off with something really complimentary. Some examples:

I’m asking myself: How can it be that I’ve never ran through your site before? It’s a great one!

Very nice. You’re site is very helpful.

I guess they hope I’ll be so excited by the ego-boo I’ll promptly approve it before reading on, where I find such Dadaist gems as “Table becomes Small Slot in final when Plane is Game it will Fetch Boy” and “when Stake is Chair it will Hope Cosmos”.

My parents recently bought a DVD player and asked for some old musical DVDs for Christmas. (Yes they’re a few years behind the times. That’s what makes them parents.) Personally I’ve been quite fond of my BlockBuster Online membership. It’s a huge improvement over the local video store, so I thought I’d look into buying my parents a one-year gift membership for Christmas, then I could keep renewing it every Christmas.

Short version: I went to the local discount DVD store and bought them a stack of DVDs instead. Why? Because Blockbuster wouldn’t let me buy my parents a gift. Oh sure, BlockBuster has a page on their site for a gift membership, but they won’t actually let me pay for it. In order to sign up my father would have to give them his credit card and agree to their terms and conditions. It doesn’t feel like much of a gift to me if it requires the recipient to pay.

Now I know there are reasons Blockbuster wants a credit card. Among other things, it helps them to avoid people walking off with their DVDs and never returning them. But is that really a problem? They’re my parents. I trust them, and I’m willing to put any DVDs they accidentally damage or lose on my card. Why won’t BlockBuster let me buy a gift for my parents? There’s another reason: they want to keep charging my parents even after the gift subscription runs out, even if they don’t want to continue the service. That’s scummy. That’s despicable marketing perpetrated by dishonest companies (not that there aren’t a lot of such companies out there). And who wants to give or receive a Christmas gift that comes with strings attached including an 8000 word contract and an indemnification clause?

P.S. NetFlix blew it too.