Month: February 2006

Yesterday’s post about copy and paste generated some great suggestions in the comments section.  I can’t tell you how nice it is to have comments once again!

I find myself having to use the following workaround almost once a day. Suppose you’re writing an email and want to paste in a snippet of text from another window. You select the text, copy it to the clipboard, and then paste it into the mail window. But there’s a problem. The original text was formatted with size, color and whitespace. Your software attempts to preserve this formatting but the end result is jarring: the fonts are too big, or too small, or the whitespace interrupts the flow of your letter. You just want the text but that’s not what you’re getting. Here’s what I do: I open up a plain text editor, such as Notepad on Windows, and paste the text into it first, stripping the formatting. Then I re-select the unformatted text and copy it to the clipboard. It works, but is clunky. Is there no better way?

Bill Scherer: “What Knot to Use in a Primitive Situation.” Also useful in suburban San Francisco.

JBE asks the all-important question: WTFMFWTFAYT? You might want to put the kids to bed before clicking the Play link next to the song title. Hey, thanks to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff for bringing this track to my attention.

Have a cold today.  Getting wooooooozy.

Jim’s Big Ego: “Everybody’s trying not to be just like everybody / And I don’t want to be like that.”

Photo Matt reports that the New York Times has “almost 25 [WordPress installations] running on both sides of the paywall and they’re going to be doing even more…”

Just noticed that my last post was a day ahead, I think because the machine hosting this blog is running on UTC. It looks like WordPress lets you put in a default time offset, which I’ve just set to -8 hours for PST. Let’s see if it works.  Update: It works!

Philip Greenspun and Shimon Rura developed a JavaScript (Ajax)-based slide show program.

A great place to take your kids while in the Bay Area: Lawrence Hall of Science. LHS is currently running a Dinosaur exhibit with remarkably lifelike animatronic dinos. The little ones had to be continually re-assured that “they’re just pretend”. The Hall is located in the hills up above Berkeley. I’d never been up there, it’s quite stunning, especially the view across the bay to San Francisco.