Mental health day

You can call it a sabbath if you like, but really, I'm just taking the day off. Saturday morning we drove to South Lake Tahoe for a wedding ceremony -- Carol's nephew tied the knot, just over the state line. The reception was at the Riva Grill at the bottom of Ski Run Blvd (in California; photos here and here) -- gorgeous view, great food. The pictures at right were taken there. We were out of the house from about 8:00am to about 9:20pm. So that made me feel like taking the day off today.

People have asked me: "Who is that little boy?" Short answer is: his grandfather is Carol's brother.

So what am I up to? In chronological order, mostly:

• made pancakes
• did a bunch of Python scripting for a friend, who I'll call "Oskar." He'll be working overseas as a missionary and wanted to set the machinery up before leaving. Machinery? Well, Oskar wants to send email newsletters with mail-merge. That is, when sending it to a few dozen people, each person will get a single email with their first name embedded in the text. Piece of cake, right? "That's what procmail(1) is for, right?" Well, yeah. Except...
  • Oskar's email client tends to encode text parts in base64;
  • He's sending me a mailing-list for each message (different messages can have distribution lists), where the mailing-list is one of the parts of a multipart message;
  • HTML with images, or attachments, may be involved.
  So I learned about Python's email package. It is really cool. Here's what I'm gonna do for Oskar's email. The address-list will be in a single text/plain part at the top level. When I find it, I'll remove it (Just like that!) from the message's data structure. If there are multiple toplevel parts left, I'll attach 'em to a new message -- otherwise I'll grab the remaining toplevel part and use that one for the message. These are "object" things and they like inherit properties of the message class; in effect, they are messages in their own right -- all I have to do is add the 'To:' and 'Subject:' headers, and I can send 'em.
• Considering that I spent my free morning programming, I decided to send you a link to Weird Al's White 'n' Nerdy video (if you've already seen it, you might enjoy "Take#1", quite athletic, or "Behind the Scenes"). Naturally I wasted spent some time tracking those down.
• We have a cable that's been hanging down in front of the kitchen window for literally months now; I finally dragged a ladder out and put something up into the rafter-tails (etc.) so the cable would be out of the way.
• grabbed the photos off the lovely Carol's laptop, and tried to make them appear on the right. http://www.htmlhelp.com/ says my HTML is right, but maybe blogger is overriding that somehow.

I was planning to flesh out an essay on decision-making: based on fear vs on faith, but taking a nap might have a higher priority....