Mokka mit Schlag

I rolled out of bed about 6:00 this morning with plans to get to the park bright and early and grab as many year first birds as I could. However, Shayna, our Maltese, had other ideas; but after a quick walk with her, I still managed to get started at the North end of the park about 7:45.

The Vale of Cashmere produced the first good bird of the day: a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. This was almost immediately followed bya Fox Sparrow. Several White-throated Sparrows, and a couple of Northern Cardinals. Then, walking back to the Rose Garden, I relocated a Hermit Thrush I’d spotted several times in the last month. I’m not sure why, but there seem to be a lot of late Hermit Thrushes hanging around New York City this winter.
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My goal for 2006 is to finally add all the regular New York City species to my life list. They’re a few that reliably show up here, but I just haven’t gotten yet. In decreasing order of probability they include:

• Purple Sandpiper. This one’s regularly seen at various locations along the New York City shoreline, including here in Brooklyn. I’ve looked for it a few times. I just haven’t gotten lucky yet.
• Common Nighthawk. These are reliably seen during for a couple of weeks migration in Central Park. Of course I went out the first night they didn’t show up. This year I’ll go sooner. They also show up in Prospect Park, but not as reliably.
• Eastern Screech Owl. At least two roost in Central Park. Officially those are released birds and not “countable”, but I’d still like to see them.

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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!