I have never once had this problem. Is it possibly because you are crazy, maybe?
I have often wished for a way to permanently disable said "feature". Perhaps with keyboard mapping I could at least move it to a key that I'm not likely to hit instead of right next to home, end, delete, etc. I should look into that.
Listen here, youngster, you don't know how good you have it. My first word processing program required me to call up the "editing subroutine" in order to insert characters into the already typed text, and doing this required taking out one floppy disk and inserting another. No wonder IT investment never had any measurable impact on aggregate productivity until the 90's.
I don't even know what I'm doing that triggers it. I don't know if it's one of the f keys or weird side keys, or some combination of keystrokes, or if I'm clicking by mistake on the OVR symbol. They didn't give us the option of a mac at school.
5: too cheap to spring for the second floppy drive?
My first word processing program required me to call up the "editing subroutine" in order to insert characters into the already typed text, and doing this required taking out one floppy disk and inserting another.
My name's Pain Perdu, and I hate having to change punch cards in my player piano, because I'm soooooo old.
5: When I was younger, you had to re-smooth the clay and start over.
2: A lot of software would be vastly improved if there was a way to turn off most of its features. This goes double for anything produced by MicroSoft, who seem to be absolutely convinced they know better than I do what it is I am trying to accomplish.
9: But the insert key doesn't consistently turn it on. At least, I just now tried to turn on overtype (first time ever!) with Insert, and I was not successful.
Why the hell is this a feature?
I'm waiting for nosflow or paranoid android to show up and indignantly argue for the inherent superiority of a separate editing mode toggled by keypress. C'mon, guys. Get on the stick, here.
12: in the days before copy and paste it was somewhat more useful. Especially when dealing with a command line. Other than that I have no answer for you.
Hello Togolosh! It looks like you are trying to write a blog post. I can help you with that! Would you like to
- make an allusion to an obscure academic topic?
- make a cock joke?
- link to something funny in the archives?
I use Insert whenever I have some text in all caps and want to retype it using standard capitalization.
That drives me nuts too, heebie. I do have a friend who uses it but I'm not sure what the benefit is.
Microsoft's page on the subject is not particularly enlightening.
13: You mean vi-style? I'm more of an Emacs person.
It happens to me all the time. And the most annoying thing is, that it gets turned on by pressing the "Insert" button. In other words, the computer has this built-in assumption that the typover mode is the default, and the "Insert" button is what one would use to go into the abnormal "Insert" mode. Which is what 100% of people use 100% of the time, and yet the passive-aggressive computer keeps reminding us that the way computers see it, "Insert" isn't really the default, because if it was, the button would be labelled "Typover", like how the "Caps lock" and "Num lock" buttons are labelled.
Num lock is at least turned on by default (I believe, most of the time) in Windows XP. I think it's off by default (by default) in Linux.
I think it's off by default (by default) in Linux.
I am imagining this sung with auto-tune.
In the old but not really old days--on some systems, at least--it defaulted to overtype and you'd press insert to go into the special insert mode.
This makes sense, I suppose, if your system is slow enough that there's a noticeable speed difference between just changing one character onscreen and having to shift all the subsequent characters over and redraw the entire rest of the line, if not the page.
(on preview, partially and grumpily pwned by ned)
Is it just me, or is heebie turning into a younger, more feminist Andy Rooney?
Ah yes, the infamous "Help" key in Mac. Not sure what is worse: Getting unsolicited help or having my text erased.
19: Good lord. I was reading this thread to CA and he made that very joke.
It'd be nice if there was a light for it on the keyboard, like there is for "scroll lock." I use the insert key frequently, as I've remapped ctrl-V in Word to a macro for plain-text paste, leaving shift-ins as the way to do the traditional paste. (Copying and pasting from web pages drove me insane before I developed this work-around.)
I'll note for the benefit of a commenter up there that it really is possible to turn off virtually everything in Word. I haven't experimented much with the other Office software, though I've (lamentably) been increasingly required to use Powerpoint and may soon begin exploring my options.
Long-time Unfogged readers will know that the fact that I'm commenting here means I'm feeling deeply depressed.
28: Don't let the insert key get you down that much, Adam.
OH! Sheer brilliance!
Open up Word. Select "Tools/Customize." Click the button that says "Keyboard" in the dialogue box that comes up. Under "Categories" select "All Commands," then search for "Overtype." At that point, "Insert" will appear under "Current Keys." Select "Insert" and then click "Remove." Then it will never happen again.
I then took the next logical step of assigning "Insert" to "EditPaste" -- so that the key does something that makes sense, given its title.
Please note that if you're using a version of Word newer than 2003, this whole routine may not work (rumor has it they've eliminated macros in later versions -- so I refuse to upgrade ever again), or you may need to be willing to poke around a bit until you find where this feature is now kept.
30: and thus the dark cloud is lifted.
I could have sworn 30 was pwnd already, but I can't find the comment. Maybe it was a link.
I have used overwrite. Multiple times even! For filling in forms where people made the form by typing many many underscores.
Undesired typing over used to happen to me all the time, and then I figured out that it was the Insert key that was screwing things up. Then, something happened so that my space bar was either locked on or wouldn't gives spaces when pressed, so I disabled the space bar and mapped the space function to the Insert key, which, on my Toshiba, is directly to the right of the space bar. It remains so mapped to this day. Suck it, Toshiba space bar!
I use Insert whenever I have some text in all caps and want to retype it using standard capitalization.
Wait, your editor won't recapitalize for you?
38: You should adopt the read style of self-correction, with a message reading only "s".
I'll note for the benefit of a commenter up there that it really is possible to turn off virtually everything in Word.
Some would argue it's preferable to turn off actually everything, usually via the expedient method of deleting Word from the hard drive.
40: This comment contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed.
When I was a kid, I didn't even have a keyboard. I had to write using this primitive tablet where you made lines by turning a couple of knobs placed at the lower corners. And anytime you shook the tablet, all your lines disappeared! So frustrating.
I have used overwrite. Multiple times even! For filling in forms
Huh. This is the only thing I can see overwrite being useful for. At least there's something; otherwise it was a goddamned head-scratcher, it was.
30 is unpwnable.
I'm actually a little bit happy now, because this thread inspired me to improve my already amazingly improved Word setup. What I should really use is Emacs, though. Do they have a WYSIWYG version yet?
44: You mean something like LyX?
In Emacs, what you see is what you get, because emacs is a text editor. You can then do other things with the text, like run it through a typesetter if it's written in the right format for one, but that's strictly external to Emacs qua text editor.
I'd actually consider switching to something LaTeX-based in an ideal world, but back here in reality, most humanities journals and presses want you to submit things in Word format.
How much work would be required to do RTF by hand?
How much work would be required to do RTF by hand?
Oh god no.
Okay, how about to encode it in Word format by hand?
Actually, recent word formats are XML based, wrapped in a zip wrapper, so it wouldn't be impossible. Especially if you had some sort of conversion program from latex, which I imagine will be forthcoming.
LaTeX to RTF already exists. I've used it myself when I had to submit a chapter for a book that had originally been written in LaTeX. It wasn't perfect, but a damn sight quicker than typing it from scratch.
43
Huh. This is the only thing I can see overwrite being useful for. At least there's something; otherwise it was a goddamned head-scratcher, it was.
Doesn't overwrite mode often save keystrokes? Suppose you want to change "." to "?". In overwrite mode you just overwrite the "." with "?". In insert mode you also have to delete the ".".
53: In insert mode you also have to delete the "."
Meh. I suppose. You have to use two keystrokes to change from (normal) insert mode to overwrite mode, and back again, in order to save the keystroke(s) involved in deleting the ".".
A lot of people don't use keyboard shortcuts, I always figured. i.e. You can delete whole words using Ctrl/Del. Tap that key combination repeatedly -- or even hold it down, if you're radical -- and you zip through (eradicate, baby!) whole clauses and sentences.
It's probably a function of how dextrous you are on the keyboard.
Show of hands: did Jon Stewart get the best of Betsy McCaughey, or vice versa?
My take: Stewart was kicking her ass until the first commercial break, but then she caught her breath and turned the tables on him.
Here's Jim Fallows:
The exchange is significant, because it demonstrates that there is indeed a way to "handle" Jon Stewart. You simply have to ignore what he says, interrupt and talk over him, and keep asserting that you're right. You even can try to usurp his role as host by mugging at the audience and rolling your eyes in a shared "there he goes again!" joke with the viewers. In retrospect, this is the crucial weakness that in their different ways both Bill Kristol and Jim Cramer revealed in their appearances on the show. They listened to Stewart and -- even Kristol!!?! -- revealed through their bearing that they recognized there was such a thing as being caught in an inconsistency or presented with an inconvenient fact. McCaughey did none of that. She is just making it up, as anyone who has followed her work over the decades will know. She was not even minimally prepared for her appearance on the show, flipping aimlessly through the giant briefing book (of legislative clauses) she brought on stage. But she didn't let it bother her. The exchange demonstrated that if the guest reveals no self-awareness or does not accept the premise of factual challenge, Stewart can't get in his normal licks. Future guests will study this show.
Don't get me wrong: I thought Stewart dealt with her bullshit better than any "real" journalist on television would have done. He had a command of the facts beyond anything I've seen in broadcast or in print. And yet even that was not equal to the power of brazen lying. I'm think I'm going to be almost as depressed as Kotsko here shortly.
Take a docx document, unzip it, and examine the enclosed word/document.xml file, before you start talking about generating these things by hand. Bear in mind that if there is any error anywhere in the document, Word will refuse to open it.
55:reveals no self-awareness or does not accept the premise of factual challenge
First rule of power politics is that the lizard brain rules.
Leftists understand. Liberalism fails.
This can be ugly (supposedly) like Carl Schmitt or acceptable like Arendt, but reason sucks.
Bob--and I can't believe I'm saying this--you're not being cynical enough. The issue is not that McCaughey appeals to the lizard brain, but that she appeals to cold sober reason with utterly mendacious claims.
Whatever penance Andrew Sullivan may do with his résistance après la guerre, I will forever hold him in contempt for putting that lying sack of shit on the cover of the New Republic in 1993.
"but reason sucks"
Will reason give me an fellatio.
58.2: seriously. What's his who made shit up at TNR and got canned for it wasn't half as pernicious.
58:It's not what is said, but the way it is said. Read your excerpt again.
Hitler, Goebbels, FDR with his Fireside chats, rhetoricians of all persuasions understand that facts, reason, logic are just a medium through which emotion can be communicated. To rely on facts and reason in themselves just communicates a lack of confidence in one's instincts and intuitions.
Or a desire to decieve.
Hitler, Goebbels, FDR
Bob, you gotta cut back on the Fox News and/or the quaaludes, man.
Hitler, Goebbels, FDR/ US out of Myanmar!
And so it came to pass that all of the Unfoggetariat were either already at the show or eating dinner or putting their children to bed.
I just watched Fargo. It was ok. Four stars. Kind of odd that my favorite character was the impassive serial killer.
It's 10:30 p.m. regular time. The kids have been asleep for a while.
I just made a delicious supper! Foolishly, since I'm not hungry, but I had (also foolishly, for the same reason) purchased mussels.
68: that's not what she meant when she said she was holding out for a man with more muscles, neb.
If you were nearby, jms, I completely would.
Jms is the second woman tonight to express an interest in my delectable mussels. Each is several hundred miles away, the first in Texas, to which she sensibly decamped before starting flirting shamelessly.
72: starting flirting?
Are you sure those mussels weren't a bit off?
66:Peter Stormare is an absolutely terrific performer. More than Macy or McDormand, I will watch a movie just because Stormare is in it. Stormare played Satan in Constantine and the nihilist on Big Lebowski. A treasure.
Hitler, Goebbels, FDR / Neb and JMS, GAR!
The point obviously is that the Big Lie works, and is about the only thing that works. No, prosperity wasn't just around the corner and we had more to fear than fear itself. But FDR got a lot of what he wanted.
I mean , check out the "Democrat" currently in the White House. The one that "wants a public option."
I'd join the birthers in a minute if it would get us single-payer.
Emerson was all over Yglesias's comments this week. I guess he just doesn't like us.
since I'm not hungry,
How can you not be hungry at dinner? Sometimes I think I'm always hungry. I'm halfway through my dinner and I'm still hungry. Maybe I do have a tapeworm, after all.
Well, I dunno, I just wasn't hungry. You know that feeling of satiëty you have after eating? I had that.
I had a bowl of cereal for dinner. And some orange juice.
And this does not make a Straussian. Straussian believe their lies are believed. That isn't what goes on.
79: Yeah, it was a dumb question. Today is not my day.
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Bob, thought you might be interested in this item: William Calley popping up at a Kiwanis Club meeting in Columbus, Georgia to publicly express remorse for My Lai for the first time. You know, I figure that after about 2025--2035 at the latest--all this Vietnam stuff will have gone by the wayside.
|>
Don't mean to harsh your rhetorical mellow, Bob, but the line about prosperity being just around the corner is associated with Hoover, not FDR.
84:What, LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger kill millions and I was supposed to be shocked about Calley? Calley was a scapegoat and distraction. Not that he shouldn't have been shot, but Calley shouldn't have been the first to die.
We Obama killed 12 women and children from a Predator yesterday. Missiles on a school. Send the suvivors a check,
87: and I was supposed to be shocked about Calley
No, just possibly "interested". Holy presumptive asswipe, bob.
Are we back to killing all the bourgeois again?
max
['This is going to be a really interesting autumn.']
'This is going to be a really interesting autumn
Threads like these I read. Despair.
Jane Hamsher and others have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to commit House Progressives to defeat Obama's Health Care Plan if it doesn't contain a strong public option. They will destroy the Obama Presidency if necessary. We will see if thy stand firm. The pressure will be hell.
Make no mistake, this is Obama. A tear ago Max Baucus was for a strong public option, and envisioned a bill that progressives would love. It is Obama who wants to kiss Grassley's butt, and Baucus is just taking one for the team.
The last time I can remember Progressives going to war against their President was NAFTA, and that was different. I just can't believe that son of a bitch wants to tear apart the Party over healthcare.
Yeah, it's Peter Daou, who worked got that evil racist Hillary, but he says the odds are not better thn 50-50 that Dems lose the house in 2010, and that Obama is a one term failure. Considering the opportunity, yeah, I now hate the bastard.
But I knew it was coming, so I guess I alway did. University of Chicago President at heart.
8 months and Dawn Johnsen is teaching a college class. She needs some income.
Fuck Obama.
28, 30, 31: You (or someone else?) Mentioned that here (or somewhere else?) Before. It has made my job immeasurably better.
I had a bowl of cereal for dinner. And some orange juice.
AB's father, thoroughly committed to chauvinist stereotypes, was in charge of her one weekend when she was ~10. Out of milk, so he served her cereal with OJ in it.
94: My wife eats cereal with OJ in it all the time. If we have milk in the house, but no OJ, she won't eat cereal.
89: Some of my best friends are bourgeois.
My wife eats cereal with OJ in it all the time.
Poor Moby, married to an insane woman. No wonder he spends so much time here.
Baucus is just taking one for the team
"Cap'n! There's a man overboard! He's beyond the reach of the reality tether, and he's not wearing the bouyancy vest of common sense! Permission to launch the skiff of rational argument!"
"It's no use, son. You can't survive out there in the sea of crazy. No sense letting bob drag you down with him."
101:Jim Messina
What's crazy is thinking Baucus is in any way acting independently of the White House, or contrary to Obama's and Rahm's plans.
99: I think she started it as a way to get the paper to herself at breakfast, but now we don't even get the paper.
What's crazy is thinking Baucus is in any way acting independently of the White House, or contrary to Obama's and Rahm's plans.
Was this true during the Clinton administration's health insurance reform as well?
I think she started it as a way to get the paper to herself at breakfast
How does this work? If she ate cereal with milk you'd rip the paper out of her hands?
104:No, it was the opposite. The story is understood well enough. Hilllary and crew drew up healthcare in the WH, and Senator David Boren demanded Republican support for the sake of bi-partisanship. Of course that was with a smaller Democratic margin in Congress and even more conservative Democrats.
This time the demand for bi-parisanship came from the White House, supposedly Rahm, but Obama has been preaching the politics of consensus for year. This time we probably do have the partisan votes for a good bill, and it is mostly Obama that is in the way.
The precedent is the stimulus bill. Obama enabled Snowe & Nelson with his own huge tax cut.
Circa approximately 1992-4, my family had a sun microsystems word processor, which was a grey plastic typwriter with an 8 x 2 inch lcd screen standing on top of it like a flimsy handle or very wide and ineffective eye.
To go back and put words in front of previously written words, you had to insert them; otherwise it was all typover all the time. Periodically while I was trying to insert, the machine would switch back over to typover and then spew out a stream of nonsense letters, overrunning my precious awkward 12 yr old prose.
Lesson learned: do not edit your work.
How does this work? If she ate cereal with milk you'd rip the paper out of her hands?
It drives everyone out of the room with its miasmic disgustingness, I think.
But I knew it was coming, so I guess I alway did. University of Chicago President at heart.
All this talk of shutting down the public option sure seems to be breathing life into the public option. But that couldn't be intentional, right?
I was going to comment on how bob was completely wrong, but if Robert Reich is to be believed, bob is right after all:
Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that's what I'm repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the Administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They'll tee-up the final bill," says someone who should know.
111: Oh, if "someone who should know" says so, how could it be wrong? Especially when he/she is quoted by Robert Reich, who was famously SOOO close to the action in the Clinton white house. Yeah, I'll just have to modify my naïve belief that Baucus is beholden to his insurance industry donors.
modify my naïve belief that Baucus Obama is beholden to his insurance industry donors.
One important thing to remember is that the mandates will send the people's money to the insurance companies, and the insurance companies will send that money to...Goldman Sachs.
112: I hope you're right. And maybe Reich is not particularly close to the Obama White House, but he's gotta be closer than I am. Or you are.
112: I'm not claiming any specials insight into the obama administration, but Max Baucus's documented concubinage to corporate interests is both a sufficient explanation, without resorting to outlandish theories about Obama conspiring with Baucus to do obama's bidding under a false flag. In this case Occam's scalpel clearly points us to the more parsimonious explanation.
112:Reich is hardly the only source or evidence. I mentioned Jim Messina above. It's a pretty much in the open, and people like Senator Rockefeller and other liberal members in Finance are furious, and not only at Baucus.
The "delay" is not an unusual tactic, they probably intend to wait til the last possible moment to hand the committee and floor a bill, and say "Do you want to kill millions of uninsured and destroy Obama? You have 45 minutes to decide."
Yglesias and Klein are already saying that constantly. If I don't jump aboard the Obama corruption, it means I want to kill the poor.
If I wanted to bring out our crazies in response to their crazies, rather than having to shout down their crazies myself, what would I do?
And why do I have to keep mentioning that the health insurance companies have to invest those mandated premiums? This is is also very very much about Finance.
President for Goldman Sachs.
Reich is calling for a March on Washington. September 16, I think.
One of the good guys.
118:I don't give a fuck about Republicans. They are irrelevant to this battle, which is between Blue Dog and Progressive Democrats.
And Firedoglake and ActBlue are raising campaign contributions for House Members who promise to vote NO on any bill without a strong public option. The idea is that once they'be taken the money...
I think the Open Left crew is doing something similar.
Progressives and liberals must be able to kill this bill.
It will, when it comes down, come down very very fast, with Obama on the phones and Biden, Rahm, and maybe even the Clintons in the Congressional offices bribing, threatening.
I actually want to kill the poor, so this puts me in an awkward position.
I was going to make the same argument as you do in 116, I thought bob's theory was outlandish, but Reich's source suggests its not all that outlandish. I hope Reich is full of shit, or Reich's source is full of shit. But unless Occam's razor comes with a lie detector built in, there's no way to say what the most parsimonious explanation is. There are like four other health care bills already in play. Why doesn't Obama criticize the Finance Committee openly? Occam's razor suggests bob's explanation.
Now why would she state an absolute committment to a public option out of the House, but not the same committment out of conference?
Firedoglake is the blog to read.
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OT Bleg:
What do people know about Fr/anc/es Mo/ore La/pp/e? She's looking for an editorial assistant for her next book. I find some of her writing style kind of annoying--maybe naive, but i like her community organizing focus.
Anybody know anything? Have any dirt?
|>
All I know about her is that you should apply.
What neb said.
No dirt that I know of, though you could probably dig some up: most detractors complain about her idealism, what you call naivete, but that comes with the territory. Maybe she's querulous or something. It's possible, but honestly, she's a freakin' saint, basically.
I actually wrote 125 without knowing the first thing about the woman in question.
127: Her most famous book is from 1971 Di/et for a Sm/all Pla/n/et. It's a vegetarian manifesto and many of the vegetarians of that era were inspired by her. (She still loves her son, though even though he eats meat--mostly forsworn red meat--except for the occasional grass fed bit.) I guess that she got a James Beard humanitarian award. She's got a post on the Huff/ing/ton Post.
I'd be curious to know what M/tch thinks.
You should look her up. She's kind of interesting.
I reviewed her as well, and god she's great. I would be willing to enthuse, might even be on the verge of it.
Admittedly, I think Di/et for a Small Plan/et may have a bunch of receipts for things like bulghur nutloaf with cashew-milk sauce. It was the 70s, and people are a little embarrassed about all that.
Nothing wrong with a good nut loaf. I say this as a carnivore.
(Plenty wrong with a bad one.)
My major recollection of DfaSP is that it made me conscious of my emerging faculty of critical thinking. I was 11 or 12 when I read it, and I recall reading arguments like the one where she supports her claim that stoneground flour is better than industrial flour by noting that all the flour in Iran is stoneground and she never saw an Iranian with crooked teeth. I recall thinking, "WTF, she thinks this kind of anecdotal observation proves a sweeping claim like that?"
Actually, 135 is misremembered. The book with the Iranians and their straight teeth was not DfaSP, but Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit by Adelle Davis, a book of similar vintage.
I'm positive about Francis Moore Lappe. DfaSP is her most famous work, and very much a product of its time, with much of the science in it dated. But she's admitted that and moved on and is very evidence-based in her arguments.
She's basically spent her life focussing on development and food security issues. The nonprofit she founded (Food First, aka Institue for Food and Development Policy) does a lot of good stuff. I have no idea what she'd be like to work for, however.
