flog

I have this little report mailer that runs two times a day. As the inherent superiority of this method of report delivery has become known throughout the TRC, the number of reports and recipients has mushroomed - resulting in my mailbox becoming full on the Exchange server due to the large number of messages accumulating due to this feature.

This single line of code has saved me so much asspain it is worth blogging about. If you set the DeleteAfterSubmit property to True, then after sending the mailitem, it will delete itself from the Sent Items folder and it will not clutter the Deleted Items folder either. Permanent deletion without any muss or fuss. I can hardly believe it. This is not like Microsoft.

    Set theMsg = ol.CreateItem(olMailItem)

    

    ' Clear any errors so you don't get a false alarm below

    Err.Clear

    

    ' Use Outlook to compose and send the message

    With theMsg

        .Attachments.Add fso.BuildPath(WorkArea, Doc)

        .Body = EmailBodyOfMessage

        .To = ToEmail

        .Subject = EmailSubject

        

        ' This will clean up the crap, yay!

        .DeleteAfterSubmit = True

        .Send

    End With



    Set theMsg = Nothing

According to google, the preferred term for a terrible sense that something bad happened yesterday is postboding, but I think the proper antonym to 'foreboding' would be 'aftboding'.

It seems, however, that I am alone in this estimation with some college student that crafts prose like a spambot.

http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=67

Why is there still so much handwringing over P2P, bittorrent, and file sharing? Oh right, it's because our corporate masters don't approve of us accessing content in ways they do not proscribe for us.

For christ's sake, people, wake up. There is no issue here. Move along.

Is it watching you?

http://www.sewerhorse.com/

They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you...at all.

While trying to reset my password for my hotmail account I was greeted with this message at the end of Microsoft's unhelpful multi-step wizard:

"Password reset instructions sent

Password reset instructions were sent to: <myemailaddr>@hotmail.com.
If you don't see the e-mail message in your inbox, look for it in your junk mail folder or check your e-mail again later."

So now all I need to do to get the instructions is to enter my username and the password I have forgotten.

I can't think of a better way to honor the man, than by sharing his words.

George Carlin died on Sunday. I, for one, will miss him.

I was killing time in the library earlier in the week and did a catalog search on theodicy. There were 19 books listed under that subject and all of them were Christian apologies confronting the problem of evil. This would suggest that Christian theologians are aware that the problem of evil is one of the top 3 most potent arguments against the existence of their hypothesized god and yet they persist in believing anyway - not just believing but writing and publishing apologies intended to convince others to continue believing.

This is baffling.

I saw Sewer Horse on the Museum of Hoaxes blog and laughed out into the air. I don't know why, I just did, you prick.

I have to assume this is bullshit because the author kept referring to microbes as "bugs", but if it's not it's just a matter of time before the Oil Companies (TM) buy it up like the water carburator, right?

Angels and demons holding hands and whistling Dixie.
We haven't had that kind of fun 'round here since 1960.
We wait in longer lines than the Russians ever did,
selling our children's souls to the highest bid.
I can't describe the way it feels.

These songs will blare out of your eyes when I get to the green building
My arrival will be televised when I get to the green build.
When I get to the green building.
Na na na, nana na na.
Na na na, nana na na.

Satan's cheerleaders prancing 'round the Maypole in December.
We haven't had that kind of spectacle here since I can remember.
Our fearless leaders say they're equal to the task,
and every point of view on this depends on who you ask.
It doesn't matter anyway.

» Read More

You're listening to your politicians
They claim to speak to God.
Can't you see it's just a fraud?
Your rituals and superstitions,
Don't you find them kind of odd?
Might as well kneel before Zod!

The French sent us a copper lady long since turning green
From New York to Los Angeles and all points in between
burning fifty million megawatts of...gasoline!

oooh!

I accept my destiny
I shall start a legacy the likes of which you've never seen.
Make them rip it, rip it clean.
I accept my destiny.
I am a ripping machine. So help me!

Rip it! Rip it!
Rip it! Rip it!
Rip it! Rip it!

» Read More

Satan destroys you, but Jesus puts you in a bowl and smokes you.

From here:
"Who remembers that asshole?
John Irving, on John Gardner

Google has failed me. I read the above quote a year or two ago in a magazine while waiting for my dentist, and although I can remember Irving's context, I remember little else. I'm thinking it was a Maclean's, or Globe & Mail profile of Irving circa: The Cider House Rules Goes Hollywood. At the time, Tom Wolfe provoked the chattering classes with his most recent divide-and-conquer loud-mouthery, an essay in Hooking Up which decried every living American novelist for forsaking their duties as the chroniclers of their times. Wolfe had already provoked several bloodletting responses from Updike, Mailer and Irving, and Irving was weary of giving free press to this flannel-clad coot. Still, the profiler pressed on. Irving finally said something to the effect that no good comes from publicly declaring what novelists ought to be writing. To hammer home the dire consequences of such foolishness, he added, "The last guy to try that was John Gardner, and who remembers that asshole?"

» Read More

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Good novel - great character development - poignant., August 5, 2000
By A Customer
John Gardner does an excellent performance of enticing the reader from the start and seductively inticing you into the novel. The character develops throughout the novel in a complex manner wothy of John Fowles (more synergistic with "The Magus" than "The Collector" or "Daniel Martin." As a female reader and a professor of literature, I am more sensitive to pornagraphic situations than the many readers, however I found the sexual description of oral sex with prostitute "Donnie" to be expecially poignant and representative of my own liciduous upbringing in Indianna than most depictions in literature.
--
I have a hard time believing that a professor of literature would use "enticing" twice (with variant spellings) in one sentence. Misspell 'worthy', 'pornographic', 'especially', her home state of Indiana, nor employ non-existent synonyms for lascivious. I'm not sure what my point is, other than, you can't always trust what you read on the Internet.

From here:

;; 4e66 last state coin inputs shifted left by 1
;; 4e6b #coins per #credits
;; 4e6c #left over coins (partial credits)
;; 4e6d #credits per #coins
;; 4e6e #credits
;; 4e6f #lives per game

;; 4e80-4e83 P1 score
;; 4e84-4e87 P2 score
;; 4e88-4e8b High score

;; 4370 #players (0=1, 1=2)

Starting address: 0
Ending address: 16383
Output file: (none)
Pass 1 of 1
0000 f3 di ; Disable interrupts
0001 3e3f ld a,#3f
0003 ed47 ld i,a ; Interrupt page = 0x3f
0005 c30b23 jp #230b ; Run startup tests

;; Fill "hl" to "hl+b" with "a"
0008 77 ld (hl),a
0009 23 inc hl
000a 10fc djnz #0008 ; (-4)
000c c9 ret
000d c30e07 jp #070e

;; hl = hl + a, (hl) -> a
0010 85 add a,l
0011 6f ld l,a
0012 3e00 ld a,#00
0014 8c adc a,h
0015 67 ld h,a
0016 7e ld a,(hl)
0017 c9 ret

;; Some sort of table lookup
;; hl = hl + 2*b, (hl) -> e, (++hl) -> d, de -> hl
;; (Used to add up scores!)
0018 78 ld a,b ; b -> a
0019 87 add a,a ; 2*a -> a
001a d7 rst #10
001b 5f ld e,a
001c 23 inc hl
001d 56 ld d,(hl)
001e eb ex de,hl
001f c9 ret

» Read More

I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.

Put a little mustard on that mustard.

I've seen this in my inbox on more than one occasion and it's probably an embellishment of a story a guy heard about something someone actually saw in an airport. What really bugs me about it is how I'm continually not just bombarded with pro-military propaganda, but expected to value the American soldiers in Iraq as heroes.

I am sick and tired of it. These soldiers, admittedly, have signed up to perform a dangerous job for too little money and are quite often screwed out of what little is owed them by the Federal government. However, they volunteered to participate in an illegal action to invade a country under false pretenses. They are not heroes according to my system of values.

I know I am out on a limb when not even Bill Maher or Penn Jillette are out here with me, but maybe 1 of the 3 flog readers can comment on why I am required to esteem people that are prosecuting (yes, by proxy but the Nuremburg defense is still invalid in my opinion) an immoral act that is making my life less free and less secure in real quantitative terms. The bigger question, of course, is why, in a free society, I am not allowed by my fellow citizens to hold or express this opinion.

Now everybody down at McDonnellzzz is down with Ronald McDonald
and I'll be hitting the bottle
and everybody cool.



Centaurs rule.

I was using Pseudomonas to argue against creationist nonsense back in 2001 on talk.origins. A species of Pseudomonas bacteria had evolved the ability to synthesize nylon oligomers through a frame-shift mutation. Considering that nylon did not exist before (about) the 1940s there is no way this could be anything but "evilution".

Well, it seems that now a bacterium that eats plastic bags has also been found. Dear creationist readers, please feel free to plug your ears and close your eyes. Satan is just fabricating this nonsense to test your faith.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to do this, but I had the run of the house several weeks ago and happened to be stupid-high. One starts playing an MP3 in WinAmp and half a second or so later, one starts a YouTube video of the song so that they are just start to go out of phase and it sounds like the band is performing in a football stadium. The game is to see how quickly you can hit the sweet spot.

E6's Synthesizer works especially well:



(you'll have to find the MP3 yourself.)

From /.:
<quote>
bowman9991 writes "Could this be the new Blade Runner? SFFMedia reports that Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick's science fiction masterpiece 'Ubik'. First published in 1969, Ubik's central character is Joe Chip, a technician for a telepathic organization that employs people with the ability to block certain psychic powers so they can secure other people's privacy. In the novel, the dead are kept in 'half-life,' a form of cryogenic suspension, with limited consciousness and communication ability. A mystical substance called Ubik, available in spray-can form, is the only thing stopping reality from disintegrating before Joe's eyes. It'll be hard to film, but fantastic if they get it right!"
</quote>

An insightful comment from the /. thread:
"To be honest I think Totall Recall is about the truest PKD film adaption there is. Yes, including Blade Runner.

The spirit of "We can remember it for you wholesale" was basically "guy has his memories messed with to think he went to Mars - or maybe it was that he did go to Mars and memories were messed with to think he didnt - etc". The film just made it longer and stacked more 'rug-pulled-from-your-under-your-feet' twists on top of each other.

Also, although it's schlocky, so was PKD. Seriously, if you think PKD was a literary master with elegant dialogue and profound characterisation... er... read more widely? And to be clear, I'm a massive PKD fan. The value of PKD is in the brainfucking ideas, but the actual "texture" of them is fairly pulp. Like Total Recall.

Blade Runner OTOH was verging on Hollywoodisation at it's worst. The spirit of "...Electric Sheep" was not "catch the replicant", it was far more broadly philosophical: hence all the stuff about android pets, social class, Mercerism, etc, which basically vanished from the film. Instead we got a simplified Cop Chases Bad Guy affair, with the MTV-esque depth you'd expect from an ex-advertisement director.

So, yeah, for my money Total Recall is a way more PKDish film than Blade Runner, which I consider perhaps the most overrated sci-fi film going..."

How is it that a JESUS vanity license plate is not taking (your) lord's name in vain?