From: Ted Zlatanov
To: gnu.emacs.help
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:27:00 -0600
Subject: Re: Emacs, oldsters, newbiness
On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:22:47 +0100 Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
TN> harden the facility — when is culture just
TN> overgrown moss? does the stone monkey
TN> even remember five centuries lost?
I can assure you that the stone monkey (in fact, *any* stone monkey) does not remember anything.
TN> is wisdom the hand that clamps down,
TN> does not soften?
Wisdom is your own mistakes giving you a reach-around, so yes.
HTH
Ted
Zinn excerpts Robert Bowman, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew combat missions in Viet Nam, suggesting a novel foreign policy: “[W]e should do good instead of evil.” I suppose King George II would respond, “But that’s what we are doing, that’s what I’ve been saying all along, we’re the good guys here.” Bowman, though, is a Catholic bishop, so the good/evil split he emphasizes is the classical, simple dictionary definition; good is good, and evil is bad — not the what’s-good-for-General-Motors-is-good and what’s-bad-for-United-Fruit-is-evil crap that KGII means.
We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom and human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations.
What does “do good instead of evil” mean?
Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water and feed starving children . . . Instead of training terrorists and death squads, we should close the School of the Americas. Instead of supporting insurrection, destabilization, assassination and terror around the world, we should abolish the CIA and give the money to relief agencies.
I’ve always been happy to read that laziness in a programmer is a virtue. How much work is it really to open iTunes, make sure the Music library is selected, click File->Import, navigate to the desktop, select the folder that contains the songs I want to add, pick that folder, wait for the import to finish, switch back to the desktop, and finally drag that folder of songs into the trash?
Too much work for me. Just typing it all tires me out.
So here’s my first Automator workflow, saved as a Finder plugin.
Open it, then File->Save As Plugin…, name it, ‘Import into iTunes’, and now it’s just right-click on that folder of songs, then More->Automator->Import into iTunes.
