Most of my loyal readers are people who know me in real life. You may even have eaten Pork with Magical Powers or had a beer with me. I do not want to alienate you, but I think you’re subscribers and access the content through a feed rather than your browser anyway. My site’s getting a surprising amount of traffic from strangers who arrive via searches for information about “clone bootcamp partition” and “pork bits.”

My inner information architect has been absorbing some SEO wisdom from the world, and I’d like to make the useful parts of the site (e.g., moving a Boot Camp partition) even more so. I’m thinking of making a new splash page that uses questions to route users to content they may find useful. I’ll also be changing the sidebar to use fewer tags to help people who land inside the site get to other parts they might like. The trouble now is figuring out how best to organize the existing content in a framework that’s flexible enough to include additions like my planned “phd process” content and yet obvious enough to help Mac OS X searches get to more Mac OS X tips when they arrive. No, I never thought I’d have enough readers to justify a redesign. The public wants to clone their drives and cook yummy pork, and I like to make the public happy.

I’m pretty excited about how long my hair is getting. Thank you, Nicole at art + science (wicker park), for rescuing it!

When one copies text from some other application and then pastes it into Word, by default, the text pastes as it appears. This drives me crazy. You might wonder why. Well, I’m a rigorous “style” user, and I would much prefer that text be pasted to look like the rest of the text rather than to stand out. For example, when I want to put a URL in my notes, Word inevitably pastes it in giant serif font. That looks ridiculous in my small, sans serif notes. I can solve this problem by choosing “Paste Special” from the “Edit” menu, but I don’t like to use a touchpad if I don’t have to. There’s no keyboard shortcut for “Paste Special.” Until now!

My small victory was to make a macro that makes “Paste Special” the default rather than the exception. Simply recording a macro didn’t work. I had to hack it. It’s a 2 line hack, but a hack nonetheless. Here is the code you need to get Word (at least on a Mac) to Paste Special by default:

Sub EditPasteSpecial()

‘
‘ EditPasteSpecial Macro
‘ Macro recorded 5/19/07 by Libby Hemphill
‘
Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText

End Sub

Thanks, Herb Tyson, for the solution.

I didn’t get to ask how many other hitchhikers they usually see or who usually gives them rides. I did learn that they prefer wide on ramps because they’re less likely to get hit by a car, and people are more likely to pull over where there’s more room. The best places to get rides are on the edges of towns; people will often offer hitchhikers short-term cash-only jobs such as tearing down a house in Pensacola, Florida. He didn’t mind his 5 day stay in Topeka because he made $500 in hand outs for which he didn’t even ask. Those Kansans are just that nice.

I wish I’d gotten their names. I hope their trip is swift and fun. I’m fascinated.