29 June 2009

Google Ad To Help You Survive Becoming Mormon



See that first Google Ad that showed up (in the blue boxes on the right) on the BBC News home page today?

Why? What is so awful about becoming a Mormon that you need a special kit just to survive the first 72 hours?

How will a radio help you?

How much does it cost...your soul?

Always be prepared!

19 June 2009

Bully, looking klassy


Rough night, Bully? Too much PBR and spare ribs? For heaven's sake, make yourself comfortable.

16 June 2009

Dear Starbucks: Your Pastries are Disgusting


Look at the size of these things! Are these pastries or really ugly decorative pillows?

These are surely designed to tempt every diabetic giant in the land.

Starbucks, must I remind you that you sell $4 coffee? These ginormous, cold, dense, sticky-icing nightmares are the stuff of highway rest stops -- not the kind with the Subway in the corner, but the kind with lottery machines by the door and chili dogs cowering under the heat lamp.

Listen, Howard Schultz: Unless you plan to stick a bowl of beef jerky by the register, you'd better get fancy pastry to match your fancy coffee. Either that or lower the coffee to 50 cents and pass the bear claw.

09 June 2009

Seriously, America? Operation brand fruit flavored snacks?


Who doesn't want a "fruit flavored" (as proven by the pictures of actual fruit in the lower right corner; very convincing, Kellogg's) snacks based on a board game that itself is based on that yummiest of experiences: surgery?

I'm not saying it doesn't make perfect sense to make a snack based on a board game; I mean, duh, I'm eating Trivial Pursweets right now. No, the true stroke of genius here is in choosing Operation, because with that choice comes your cover boy; the face that launched a thousand fruit flavored snacks. Which makes you hungrier: the red nose, the crossed eyes, the mercury thermometer, or the Ronald Reagan haircut? I can't choose!

The "fruit" flavored "snacks" seem to be shaped like a bell, a dog?, maybe a turtle?, a bird, a red thing, and is that a lemon wedge? I don't know about you, but when I go in for laparoscopic surgery, I always bring my turtle and my red thing. I suppose the alternative choices were treats shaped like a blue bedpan, a green syringe, and a purple insurance claim. So, good choices, Kellogg's.

If Michael Pollan sees these, he's going to need a doctor.

08 June 2009

Applescript for Journler: puts Contacts in Comments

Ok, now I'm just being annoying. I didn't want to be mucking around with Applescript at all, but Journler is so cool and so useful that I just can't help myself. With just a few little scripty tweaks, I'm able to use it as my dream PIM (that's a personal information manager for those of you who aren't annoying).

[p.s. Did you know that when you hover over the date of an entry in the browser list for a few seconds, the tip will show the amount of time that has elapsed since the date of the entry? So hover over 9/8/08 a few seconds, and underneath the tip showing "~ 8 months 4 weeks and 2 days ago". That is so cool! Make your savant computer slave calculate for you!]

Anyway, I used the script from my last post to import a bunch of iCal entries for meetings that I've had, each with one attached contact. In Journler, I needed to be able to see a list of all those meetings, see the date, see the topic of the meeting in the title, and also see the contacts so that I could see at a glance when I last saw who in comparison to everyone else. Because the contacts/resources have a many-to-one relationship to the entries, they aren't easily listed in the grid view. The entry Comments to the rescue!

This script makes a list of all the contacts names and copies it to the comments column, which can then be shows in the grid list and sorted on and so forth. Voila (hey, those French lessons are coming in handy, too).

All warnings apply; again, this was quick and dirty scripting.

-- place in ~/Library/Scripts/Journler
-- Copies selected entry's contact resources to comments
- Created by Courtney Lamb 6/7/09 (www.courtneylamb.com)
-- Use at your own risk!
tell application "Journler"
set theEntriesList to selected entries
repeat with theEntry in theEntriesList
set theNames to ""
repeat with theResource in resources of theEntry

if type of theResource is contact then
if theNames is not "" then
set theNames to theNames & ", " & name of theResource
else
set theNames to name of theResource
end if
end if

end repeat
set comments of theEntry to theNames
end repeat
end tell

04 June 2009

Applescript to create Journler entries from all events in an iCal calendar

I searched long and hard on the you-know-what to find some nerd who had already done what I needed to do -- "import" all of my iCal events in a certain Calendar into Journler as events, also attaching the iCal event attendee to the Journler entry as a Contacts resource.

Surely someone else had done this already! I don't have to muck around with programming/scripting anymore, do I? I don't have to learn AppleScript all of a sudden; I mean, I'm sick of this shit, we're supposed to have robot servants to do things like this for us by now!

So I had to be my own nerd, and if you are the me of yesterday and are looking for a script to do this, you are welcome. Just use it at your own risk because I learned as little about AppleScript as I possibly could in order to throw this together and resented it every step of the way and wasn't careful with error handling and all that mess.

But it totally works! As a reference, I converted 158 entries this way with no problem, took a few minutes. I knew my mysterious past in data conversion would pay off some day.


-- place in ~/Library/Scripts/Journler
-- Creates Journler entries from all iCal events in the calendar named "Journler Drop" (copy desired events here)
-- Sets a tag of "iCal" to the Journler entry
-- In addition, if there is an attendee on the iCal event (just the last attendee, if there are multiple), it attaches a Contacts Resource to the Journler entry
-- Created by Courtney Lamb 6/4/09 (www.courtneylamb.com)
-- Use at your own risk!

tell application "iCal"
tell calendar "Journler Drop"
set theCount to count of events
-- Loop through all of the iCal events in the given calendar
repeat with j from 1 to theCount
set theEvent to item j of events
set theSummary to summary of theEvent
set theDate to start date of theEvent

-- Put both the iCal description and location in the Journler notes
set theNotes to ""
set theLocation to ""

if exists (description of theEvent) then
set theNotes to description of theEvent
else
set theNotes to ""
end if
if exists (location of theEvent) then
set theLocation to location of theEvent
else
set theLocation to ""
end if

-- Get only the last of the attendees, if any
set theContactID to ""
if exists (the last attendee of theEvent) then
set theName to display name of the last attendee of theEvent
tell application "Address Book"
if exists (the first person whose organization = theName) then
set thePerson to (the first person whose organization = theName)
set theContactID to id of thePerson
else
set theContactID to ""
end if
end tell
end if

-- Create the Journler entry
set theNewTag to {"iCal"}
set theCategory to "Contacts"
tell application "Journler"
set anEntry to make new entry
set the name of anEntry to theSummary
set the date created of anEntry to theDate
set the tags of anEntry to theNewTag
set the category of anEntry to theCategory
set the rich text of anEntry to theLocation & "
" & theNotes
-- Create the attached Contact resource from the iCal attendee
if theContactID is not "" then
set aResource to make new resource with properties {owner:anEntry, type:contact, contact id:theContactID}
end if
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end tell