Project Steev

randomness restored and renewed

If you've known me more than 6 months you've probably noticed I used to have random quotations at the bottom of my emails. Like, for 10 years. Then when I switched to using apple Mail, I couldnt have that anymore, because it depended on the old unix .signature files and a cool perl script i wrote (why the hell isn't Mail compatible with the old .signature files? that's something I thought Apple would be cool enough to do). So I had over 300 quotes in my quote file and they were just languishing since August. Finally on Saturday I figured out how to do it. After looking for someone else's solution and not finding one for the last few months, then trying to write my own software that would generate an apple signature file (which involved generating XML, RTF, and MIME-base64 encoded data in just the right way, which proved insanely challenging), then failing, then looking one more time, and I found it! something called Mailtunes, a little shareware thingie that lets you insert the output of applescripts or perl or shell scripts into your email signatures (It's called Mailtunes because the default behavior is to put the artist and title of the current song you're listening to on iTunes.) So that allowed me to use my good old perl script i've been using for 10 years. I've been so happy with it that i just paid them the $10 shareware fee.

And the nice thing is that the random number generator on my powerbook seems a little more random, or at least skewed in a different way, than my old linux server, because i'm getting a pleasantly different than before array of random sig quotes now. yay.

i love quotes. here's a random sampling:

"An entrepreneur is a person whose profession is to respond to market forces."
- Paul Treanor

"Business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual
simulation of its own lynching."
-Thomas Frank, 'Alternative to What?'

"Not even Adam Smith thought the market could do everything."
-Benjamin Barber, 'Jihad vs. McWorld'

interesting. everything in this sample is business-oriented. well, critique of business. but there's other stuff too. like:

"It's still shocking, but smoothly so."
-Jon Leidecker, on the new version of 'Plexure'

now there's a non-sequitur for you...