MS Word: How to Make All Caps?

I was asked yesterday how to turn a whole paragraph of text in Microsoft Word to all caps. Here’s how you do it.

Let’s say you have a paragraph of text like so:

Sample “Lorem ipsum” text written in Word.

1. Select all the text you want to change.
2. Right-click the text and select “Font” from the pop-up menu.

Pop-up menu when text is highlighted. “Font” is selected from the menu.

The Font formatting menu screen displays.

3. Select the “All caps” check box in the “Effects” grouping.
Notice that in the Preview window, our text is now in all upper case or capital letters.

MS Word Font formatting window with “All caps” selected.

4. Click the “OK” button.
Your original text displays in all uppercase or capital letters.

Sample “Lorem ipsum” text written in Word, now in all capital letters.

Other common uses of this: strikethrough all text; set superscript like with 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd; set subscript to create molecular formulas like H₂O.

A Darkness on the Edge

What it meant to me finding Bruce Springsteen on a Lou Reed album.

First, there is the violin and cello playing a five-note rhythm, around and around. There are little chirps of violin up and down. Then a synthesizer creeps up, with just one or two notes. Someone is laying heavy on the keys, like Fuck all this classical bullshit. The violin and cello continue. Then a guitar, an electric guitar, picks up the violin’s cry to mellow out the struggle. A bass, big stringed beast, fumbles in, quiets everything besides the violin. They are going to pull us through whatever the fuck this is. Then Lou Reed starts singing. And then it gets ugly.

The song “Street Hassle” closes the A-side of the 1978 album which bears its name. There are three parts: “Waltzing Matilda,” “Street Hassle,” and “Slipaway”. Each section has its own theme: Matilda is about a woman and a male prostitute, Hassle tells of a woman dying at a drug dealer’s apartment, and Slipaway relates the loss of a male lover, presumably from the POV of another man. In the writing about this song, Slipaway is often thought to be one of the most autobiographical bits Lou Reed ever allowed to be recorded, presuming it to be about his breakup with a trans woman, Rachel Humphreys.

Sandwiched between parts two and three is what we might call 3a. Hassle (part two) ends with the aforementioned death, and mournful lines about how some people can’t find their own voices and so they follow something, and that is bad luck. The violin and cello we heard at the beginning come back, but they wear the guise of an electric bass. Deep and low. It’s taking us down. The electric guitar comes in-line with it, then starts to fall out of step, saying uh-uh, uh-uh. Reprimanding. The violin returns, soaring. A cacophony of voices decay to a drum, a heartbeat. A sign of life. A new voice comes on, reassuring. “Well hey man that’s just a lie….”

The usual joyous, roadhouse, getting drunk and racing cars voice of Bruce Springsteen comes on like morning truth after a one night stand. The dream of the road meets the realities of the city. It’s heartbreak.

Wait man, that’s just a lie. It’s a lie she tells her friends. There’s a real song, a real song she wouldn’t even admit to herself, bleeding in her heart, it’s a song lots of people moan, it’s a painful song, with a lot of sad truths and life’s full of sad songs, a penny for wish, and wishing won’t make it so, where a pretty kiss, where a pretty face can’t have its way, though tramps like us we were born to pay.

“Street Hassle: Part III” as transcribed in Pass Through Fire: The Collected Lyrics

Slipaway comes on, with its plain naked need for love, like a sheep’s bleating in the field for an absent shepherd or a bee’s mad buzzing for lost flowers; it is the best part of the album, if not the entire Lou Reed Arista era. Lyrics so plain, simple, raw, that Reed didn’t even include them in his first book of lyrics, Between Thought and Expression. “Love has gone away, And there’s no one here now and there’s nothing left to say. But, oh, how I miss him, baby….” What else could you say? I miss my love.

In college at UCSD, I was, musically speaking, in a hodgepodge of media: a mix of tapes, albums bought as cheaply as possible from used record shops, and a few CDs. I bought my first CD player with the first student loan disbursement. I got a Columbia House 12 for a penny deal under a fake name. (Hope the statute of limitations has run out on that.) I was experimenting with Lou Reed, unsure of where he would place in my head. I bought Street Hassle on cassette from some big open wire-frame bins upstairs in the school bookstore. I already had an x-teenth generation LP of Velvet Underground and Nico, which lead me to eventually get a “Best of” on CD. (Best of? Yes, it exists.) But at the time, I was deep in the tank for Springsteen. We had Born in the USA on vinyl in the house growing up, and his videos in constant rotation, on a friend’s cable MTV and on late night “Friday Night Videos” on the public channels, were like golden tickets to a future I wanted very badly. Nebraska was one of the first CDs I bought at a store. The jewel case still has the “Best Value” sticker on it.

Bruce’s dark searing mood on Nebraska was pointing me in a direction I wasn’t sure of. And it didn’t help that his other albums, even the menacing Darkness at the Edge of Town–which he was recording when he ran into Lou–didn’t match what he was doing there. It was a one-off, a come on. Could that road even be trusted? I mean, this was the Racing in the Streets guy, the Rosalita Come out Tonight guy. (As I got older I did see the darkness and despair sewn in. I don’t need a lecture.) Nebraska was, shit… I took my brother’s job while he was at war and he came back, became a misfit, and now I might have to arrest him. That’s grim. That’s 10x “hide beneath your covers and study your pain.”

So maybe I’d give solo Lou a try. Horns and loud guitars. He called back to my all time favorite Velvets song, trashed it, and went barreling on. Like stripping off an old jacket and looking for new skin. This was a dude who knew what he was doing. Even the sarcastic “I Wanna be Black”, hell, I was a fucked-up middle class college student! And I didn’t want to be that, either! If he was kidding or lying or pretending, I wanted to go, too. Maybe I’d just be following him because I had no voice of my own, and this would be bad luck as he prophesied, but I was going to go as far as I could. I became a Lou Reed devote.

And then Street Hassle, the song. Part 3a. Bruce was here, in the deep darkness, too! The voice of my dreams and desires. And then it all clicked. What I wanted as a kid, what I wanted as a young adult. The mystery and pain of love tempered in the simplest lines. Oh. Oh, baby.

Come on, let’s slipaway.

Work in Progress: The Model

After dinner, Jack offered to wash the dishes. Bud dried. Fran and Olli sat in rocking chairs on the back porch and watched fireflies wink on and off, while the bug zapper sucked mosquitoes out of the air. Fran took another beer bottle.

Joey, the white peacock, came around and rubbed Fran’s leg. His tail dusted the floorboards as he walked. She reached down and scratched his head. “He’s like a dog,” she said. Her fingers went down into the feathers to his neck. “I didn’t realize how small they were.”

“Peacocks are the great illusionists. You think they’re one thing, but they’re something completely else. Especially when his tail is out. Just a tiny thing acting all big.”

“Just like a man,” said Fran. She laughed and raised her bottle to click it with her new friend, but Olli was just looking out into the night, smiling.

“Bud was my second husband. My Charles, he was my first. First everything. But he hit me. Bud came to my counter to purchase rouge for a girl he was seeing. Alice. She told him what kind to get and he’d fetch it for her on his day off. He had a list. Can you imagine this man, Bud? At the makeup counters in Dillard’s?

“He’d come around every two or three weeks. I could only imagine how much she must’ve slathered on. Stuff should last you two, three months at least. One time I didn’t put enough cover on a purple mark Charles gave me, here.” She touched her collarbone. “Bud saw it. He said it was like a stain on the Mona Lisa.

“We got coffee a few times in the mall on my break. We’d get lunch at Mr. Pao’s. Back then I was eating two combos. Bud bought them both. I’d always been a big girl, but I got really big with Charles. Eating my feelings, as we say in Rebooters. I knew I was a married woman, but I fell, Fran, I fell so hard for him. Bud.

“Two months later, after Charles bruised a rib and I couldn’t breathe right, Bud picked up my bags from our house. I found out he and Alice had been broken up for six months and he had a stockpile of her makeup.”

Bud and Jack came outside and sat down on a bench. “What are you ladies gabbing about?”

“Bud, you old romantic!” said Fran. Joey had climbed onto Fran’s lap and laid his head on her shoulder.

“Olli,” Bud said, “you didn’t tell her the story.”

“You bet I did, Bud.”

“What story is that,” said Jack.

“Just how they met,” Fran said. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

Fran told how she and Jack had been set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. Diane. How Diane had shown up at the table during their date and Fran had waived her off.

“I guess I was all right,” Jack said.

“You still are,” Fran said.”Mostly.” She finished her beer.

They sat on the porch listening to the bug zapper for a while, and then it was time to go

Work in Progress: Isolation Box (2)

Another section from “Isolation Box”.

Stevie took a shower when he got home from cleaning his dead father’s apartment. His nose still had whiffs of the stale and rotten food that lingered in Barlow’s home. He ate dinner in his pajamas with Gina and his sons, James and Kennedy, ages seven and nine. And that night in bed, he lay stiff until Gina asked him what was wrong. He asked her, “Can I listen to your heart?”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. Barlow had some notes about the sounds of heartbeats. You know how he was about acoustics. Just, can I?”

“I think we have the stethoscope from when I was pregnant with Kennedy in the bathroom. Bottom middle drawer.”

“No, not with the stethoscope. I want to just hear you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She uncurled from the fetal position she used to start her nightly sleep.

Stevie leaned over her. He unbuttoned the top of her nightgown. He rested his ear against her sternum and felt her body pulse. He heard her draw in breath. Molecules of oxygen filtered through her lungs and hopped into her blood stream, running through the highways of her arteries, returning with carbon hitchhikers up the back roads of her veins. He inhaled when she did. His thoughts melted into her breath, her pulse.

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Gina. She patted his shoulder. “Off now.”

“Why? I was just–”

“Get off me,” she gritted her teeth. He rolled off her and lay next to her. “You got hard,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Is everything about sex with you? You would use your own father’s death to get laid?” He said nothing. “I bet you think he’d like that, using whatever you can to have sex.”

“That’s not it,” he said. He turned on his side, away from her. “That’s not it. Good night.”

Work in Progress: Isolation Box

This is a section of my current work in progress called “Isolation Box”.

After the pages of notebook scribbles on the Philly sound, there was a stark, sparse page with “Imagine” written in Barlow’s neat engineer’s script. A table drawn with heavy lines had five entries: vocal, piano, bass, drums, strings. Underneath, in a hurried, lighter stroke were entries for “John” and “Yoko”.

“John’s the only vocal, Barlow. You know that. And why is Yoko listed?” Stevie tapped the table, then flipped through the albums chaotically filed on the bookshelves. He found the Lennon disc and set it up on the turntable. The settings came up when he typed the name and track into the Isolation Box plugged into the stereo system.

The simple piano chords came from the speakers. Barlow had written, “Turn down all,” next to the instruments and vocals, but he hadn’t left them as settings on the Box. Stevie looked at the virtual dials and levels that recreated the recording tracks for the song and pulled the levers down to zero. He heard nothing. “Up all the way!” was written next to the “John” entry. Stevie found the “John” lever and pushed it to the top, expecting to hear white noise hiss. Like a fish surfacing from murky waters, a slow steady beat came. No, it was two beats. John Lennon’s heartbeat.

He pushed up the “Yoko” lever and heard her soft beat echoing John’s. When Stevie was in high school, he had seen a biography of which had a video of Lennon recording the song and Yoko sitting near by. He closed his eyes now and listened to their heartbeats fill the room.

The track ended and a guitar crackled through from the next song, unfiltered by the Box. He re-set the stylus to the lead off track and sat in his father’s chair.

“So this is what you were up to,” he said when the track ended again.

Music While Writing

I would love to say my writing is affected by the music I listen to. I wish I could put on Bowie and channel his amazing spirit into my work. Or the musical inventiveness of The Magnetic Fields. Or even bring Bach’s contrapuntal patterns into my writing. But I’m shit at listening to music when I work. At least the music I would listen to when I’m not working.

I love music. Putting on some album and jamming, or dancing around my room, especially with one of my girls, is a primal joy. But not when writing.

Maybe it’s the lyrics. There was a great suggestion I saw once that said to use the music for video games for studying. That music is meant to increase focus. I tried that for a bit.

But there is one thing that I’ve found actually useful. It’s a youtube channel called “ChilledCow”, and it’s particularly the video called “Lofi hip hop radio”. There’s a loop of an anime girl on the video area, writing out long hand some notebook. Every once in a while, she looks up, out the window, over her cat on the windowpane, and into the city. Then, back to work.

She’s my sister in the struggle. Always vigilant, always writing. Getting that work done. She and the music are meditative in their repetition. I once tried to listen to the same music on their Spotify playlist, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe it’s the difference between playing a playlist from someone vs. listening to the radio. The mystique of the radio always wins. And seeing her get back to work, I am reminded, I need to get back to work. Or as Mr. Bowie said,

I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision
And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A

virtues & values: the children’s book

When we were kids, we had a few books from a series that had a great influence on us. They helped steer our imagintion and moral compass in the way that good children's books really should. However, they did not effect such a great influence that we remembered their series title.

For most of our book shopping life, we have been looking for a series called "The Virtue of…" They were tall, thin, white books that each focused on a single person from history: Lincoln. Louis Pasteaur, Will Rogers, Helen Keller, Christopher Columbus, etc. All thes, we had. And each story told the historical person's life through the lense of a virtue they were perhaps known for or that guided their lives.

We knew we wanted these books for our children. And we wanted them for ourselves, to relive our younger days and look at the old footprints by which we once measured our own feet. In every used and new bookstore we entered, we asked after this series. And, to a bookseller, each said, "Wow, that sounds like a great series, but I have never heard of it." We've been seriously buying books for the better part of 15 years now, and it's been a fruitless search.

But you, dear kind reader that you are, knew this tale would have a happy ending. And so this one does. Behold! They are not "The Virtue of…", but "The Value of…" The series itself is called ValueTales. How happy we were to find a "shrine" for ValueTales right here on our very own Internets. We came across their true name through ebay, and there are many for sale on ebay, and some for sale on amazon. But the most we found for sale are through abebooks. And this makes us so very very happy. Alas, they are out of print, but just knowing they are alive and well (and exist! they exist!) on the used books scene is good enough for now.

mailing with php

We hate it when things are more difficult than they should be. (And who is to gauge how difficult it should be? We should!)

That's how it was in our latest struggle through the Great App that will Solve all Problems (GASP). One of the last things we chose to implement in the GASP is a mailto function that will mail an internal user when an external user does something. Sounds easy, yes? And in fact, it is. But it took us a while to get there. Because we learn everything the hard way.

So to keep anyone else from going through the crap we went through: make sure the server you are working on will send out mail before you go nuts trying to make it work. That might seem obvious to others. But remember: we learn things the hard way. Having an external, private server can help immensely on this. Before you fuss about scripts that don't work, test them on a server you know is good.

So what did we use, what did we learn? Mailing something in php is a snap. Just use the mail() function. Do not listen to all the other crap out there about needing x number of files to get shit done. Use the friggin mail() function. It goes mail($to, $subject, $message).

That said, the Surreal-Atmosphere tutorial was very helpful. So thank you for taking apart a small script and kicking it around until it made sense.

Many people apparantly found the emailform.php script very useful. That may be. We did not. We also did not find Jack's FormMail.php useful. But both of these failures were, most likely, due to the server we were developing on.

Lastly, if you need more features in mailing, you might want to check out PHPMailer on sourceforge. They seem like there's a lot there to work with. And they have docs, which makes our cold blackened hearts happy. 

harassment takes a back burner

So it seems that the whole Winnie Pooh stuff has gone away. We can only hope.

The Taquito is on the way soon. We've been thinking a lot about home movies recently. While we don't have a fancy shmancy movie camera, we do have a small camera that will take clips, and we can take still pictures like a muthatrucker. So what we need is editing. We have been really interested in Jahshaka, the open source movie editing software. But then recently, we've been seeing some free online tools. Eyespot is one such online editor. Jumpcut is another. We haven't tested any of these, but we are willing to check them out.

Another big thing we have been seeing a lot of online talk about it Firefox extensions. Now, we love ourselves some Firefox extensions. And we are aghast to find that SessionSaver is a veritable memory sieve. We've been wondering where our memory has been going (and no, this has nothing to do with the parking lot at the slam). TabMixPlus is supposed to be an excellent replacement for SessionSaver, with a whole bunch of tabbing and memory saving built in. W00t! Plus, our good buddies at lifehacker have been putting together some interesting Firefox extension packages. We're excited about those, too. And lastly, this might be our favorite extension since "Open all linked pictures in new window": DownThemAll! This little bugger downloads everything off a site. It's like pictures and sitesucker all in one. Neat!

Now here are some things we might classify under web design and general design. Firstly is an AJAX-enabled color themer: Color Tool 2.0.1. We've used lots of themers before and this one is nice, too. Next is an awesome gallery of classic arcade artwork. One of our earliest calls to the world of design was the come-on in the darkness of the Bunny Hutch and Corbin Bowl arcades. Wait, rephrase. Oh, nevermind. Behold: The Arcade Art Library! Now granted, we've never Varkon in our lives, but damn, that's some great sideart. And lastly, there is EveryStockPhoto.com. This site collects Creative Commons licensed pictures and allows you to use them at your whims. Nice.

If you've been following our trevails in this blog, you'll know that we have some serious-ass networking issues. We've tried a lot, but we're always willing to try more. We're hoping Network Magic won't bite up in the ass. Yet another software package that promises to make networking easier, file and printer sharing a snap, and etc., etc., etc. And then there's Vyew, which promises easy web conferencing. Though when they require Flash updates and recommend IE and Java, we wonder at how much we would really use the damn thing to begin with.

2 more that we can't leave without telling you about. First is a nifty Ray Carver site we found, and it includes a few (3) audio snippets of Ray laughing. Joy. Pure joy. PinkDome is a local lefty news & politics site our friend Gen tipped us to. So far, we haven't been greatly offended.

AJAX: ajaxwrite on the web

AjaxWrite promises MS Word-like functionality in a web app. Very neat.