andthennothing.net

American culture is fascinating. Documentaries about American culture is fascinating.

I’ve just finished watching Spellbound, a documentary about American youngsters (9-14 years old) studying dictionaries for hours a day just to be able to spell words like wheedle, distractible, heleoplankton, drepaniform and akaryote during the National Spelling Bee. It’s sort of a children pageant for brainiacs.

It’s very foreign to me as a Swede where competition doesn’t play as large of a role in upbriging and education as it seems to do in America. The kids are amazingly good at studying and learning how to spell, but aren’t there better things to learn and shouldn’t kids be allowed to be kids? Interesting documentary and phenomenon though.

<rant>Now I’ve just used Outlook for the last time ever I hope. I made a partial export of my e-mails 26 months ago, but I continued to use Outlook for a while, until I switched completely to use Opera. But now I’m backing up my desktop (in order to reinstall it) and it’s time to get all information out of there. And I sure don’t want to use Outlook no more.</rant>

The last time I wanted the e-mails as one e-mail per file, because the e-mail application I switched to supported importing those files, so I made a script (after a lot of agony) that managed to do that. So now I thought I just had to extend that script a bit and everything would be a-ok. But there are two problems: 1) the script didn’t export attachments (which I didn’t need last time), and 2) Opera doesn’t support importing individual files, just .mbox files. So after some work with improving the script it dawned on me that it would be quite a lot of work. And people get paid to write stuff like that.

So, I swallowed my pride and installed Eudora and tried to import the everything from Outlook. But it crasched :-( So, I swallowed my pride once more and installed Thunderbird, which sucessfully imported everything from Outlook. And since Thunderbird uses .mbox for storage, it’s a nobrainer to “export” from Thunderbird and import into Opera (which also uses .mbox natively).

Even though I didn’t have much use of my 26 months old script I realized one thing from that blog entry: it is 26 months since I first used COM (or more correctly since I first got something working using COM, I tinkered with COM one time before). Since then I haven’t used COM that much and I can’t say I like it. But I have used it to a fair amount at work to customize the IDE I use at work, CodeWarrior. And perhaps I would’ve never started doing that if I hadn’t done that Outlook-export script 26 months ago.

Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But you always learn!