Author: Brian

I was grumpy, it was cold and rainy. This was a couple months ago, so it wasn’t as cold as it has been, but cold enough. I stood at a bus stop, hoping to catch a quick ride over the bridge to get some lunch and get back to my office before my hour was up. I stood under the shelter, out of the rain.

A gaunt older man, in jeans and a flannel shirt and ski jacket, walks up, looking in the direction the bus will be coming. Not seeing one, he steps under the shelter, pulls out a pack of smokes, lights one up.

I was grumpy, it was cold and rainy. But, whatever, I can live and let live. Bus will be here soon enough. I pull out my iPhone and surf so I don’t have to pay attention to the smoker flouting the non-smoking rule at the bus shelter. I tune out.

Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of some interaction between a car and a bike in the green bike box that ends with the car honking its horn. The smoker reacts with a laugh. “Did you see that asshole bike?”

No, I didn’t, but since the bike probably had the right of way, now the smoker has annoyed me. “Did you know that bus stops are non-smoking areas?” I replied.

He looked at me. “Oh. All of them?” I nod.

He leaves the stop and walks away, into the rain, cigarette still smoldering from his lips.

Last night, on my way home from work, I’m tired and it’s raining. iPhone tells me that the bus is less than 10 minutes away. A lady walks up, chattering on her phone, looks up the street, doesn’t see the bus. Out comes the cigarettes.

Again, as long as she stands over there and not near me I don’t care. I stand and wait, my back to her and the wind.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a bright red spark rush pass my foot. Startled, I look down and see that the smoker has dropped her ash and it had blown past my leg.

Now angered that she’s annoying me with more than just breaking TriMet rules with her carelessness, exaggerating it into my mind into willful endangerment (“She tried to BURN ME ALIVE!” echoes in my head), I turn and ask her if she knew that bus stops are non-smoking zones. I try (and likely fail) to sound polite and genuine.

“Only the shelters,” she says, standing just outside the shelter, her arm brushing up against the glass.

“Are you waiting for a bus?” I ask, more snark in my voice.

“Yes,” she says, the phone still hiding her ear. I had obviously interrupted her phone call.

“Then you’re at a bus stop,” I reply with impeccable (to me) logic, and I turn back to watch for the bus, which soon arrives.

She keeps glancing at me even after we’re on the bus.

Look, smokers, I’m sure you all feel like some kind of oppressed minority right now. We can all live together. But if I have to put up with your poisonous, carcinogenic smoke blowing around me, can you at least try to be polite about it? Can you not drop your fucking ashes on my shoes, or set me on fire, or make grating, annoying assumptions about other people?

I swear I only get pissy when smokers piss me off about something else. If you want to flout the law, don’t be a fucking dick about it or my own, inner, fucking dick will come out.

“I can’t tell you how appreciative I am that you all actually showed up.”

I discovered that there is an entire store devoted to Nothing. But. Pirate. Stuff.

This boggles my mind. There are so many ways that’s awesome.

In the eternal battle between pirates and ninjas*, I admit, I’m a pirate partisan. So I’m gonna have to score this round to the pirates. Do ninjas have their own stores? No. I think not.

Sure, there are “martial arts” stores and stores devoted to Asiana, but specifically and exclusively ninja stuff? I see none. There appear to be some online stores, but no actual storefronts.

And to those who would suggest that ninja stores are just hidden, I say, again: show me the evidence.

If nothing else, pirates take the lead. Good job, pirates! Or should I say, “Arrrrrr!”

Continuing in the vein of “things I never noticed before”, while I’m sitting here waiting for laundry to finish, CAKE’s “I Bombed Korea” came up in iTunes. CAKE is one of my all-time favorite artists, and I must have listened to all of their albums hundreds of times.

Hang on… OK, iTunes tells me that I’ve listened to this song 64 times. But I’m sure there’s times that iTunes hasn’t captured. But, still, call it a hundred. Point is, I’ve listened to this song, and all of CAKE’s stuff, many many times.

My iTunes computer outputs to my home stereo, and for the longest time, my home stereo was badly connected. I’m not sure what was wrong, but I got no equalization at all and lots of noise and hiss. But after my new carpet was put in, I took the time to carefully re-hook up my stereo and now it sounds so much better.

Back to the present. That song came on…

…and this time, unlike the dozens of times before, I heard a second, syncopated (is that the right word?) voice in harmony with John McCrea’s voice. Never before, only today.

To be honest, most of those times were on an iPod and through Apple’s own earbuds, but some of them were on this very home stereo system.

It’s amazing what I can hear with new ears.

Holy crab! I can see the other side of the room!

Did not realize until last night just how much haze there is in a bar full of smokers.

I’m glad it’s gone.

Also noticed the bouncers being a bit more lenient about the cover charge if they think you’re stepping outside for a smoke.

I’m not sure if this will be interesting to anyone else but myself, but the process I used to produce my linked movie list was fairly complicated, and for myself and, perhaps, others, might be useful as an idea of how to get things done on a Mac (although there may be similar tools available on Windows).

I started by compiling the list of movies I had seen last year. Luckily I had the foresight of trying to post about, and tag, all of them. So getting the starting point was as simple as clicking that link.

I wanted the list for my year-end (year-beginning, I suppose) post to have each title linked to it’s Internet Movie Database page. But when I contemplated doing a search for each one, by hand, and copying-and-pasting each URL, and writing out each link with all its tedious a href="" and angle brackets and whatnot.

Now, I use TextExpander to save me steps when typing out common phrases, and especially when blogging and typing out links. Such genius. I’ve long used similar programs going way way back; they run in the background, and when they detect a specific key combination, the program automatically expands that into the actual phrase. For instance, if I typed ahreff, TextExpander substitutes the code for a link, and moves the cursor to the right spot for me to type out the actual URL.

But that wasn’t gonna cut it for a list of 50 movies. Even saving me a few steps, it would take forever, and with the added pain of having to copy and paste from my browser into another program… no. There had to be a way to automate it.

If I were a programmer, or better at shell scripts or scripting languages like Perl or PHP, I would spend a small amount of time writing a program to do all this for me. Alas, I’m a power user, but not a programmer. I have written small shell scripts, but I thought this was beyond me, at least now.

I could conceptualize the basic process, which is the first step:

1. Take list of names, one by one, and:
2. convert the name into a search term, then
3. use that search term to find the IMDB page
4. copy that resulting URL, then
5. construct the link text.
6. And insert it around the movie title in a new text document.
7. Repeat for each item in the list.

Luckily, I discovered that there’s a way to create a URL that will force Google to give it’s top hit for any search term, also known as “I’m feeling lucky”. I don’t remember where I saw it first, but this page describes the technique.

I thought that if I could figure out a way to insert the movie name into a Google “Lucky” URL, then having some way to automate opening up a bunch of those URLs would give me the list of IMDB addresses I needed.

Then it would just be a matter of creating the whole text that represents the linked movie name.

Not being a programmer, I still had an awesome tool to work with: Apple’s built-in Automator. It’s a GUI program where you drag and drop different modules representing each step of a workflow. It’s beautiful for repetitive actions, though it has its limits. And it was perfect for me. Or so I thought. It actually took two different Automator workflows to get what I needed.

First, I had to do a bunch of search-and-replace on the list of movie names. A URL doesn’t have spaces in it, so I replaced all the spaces with + signs, and took out all the other punctuation. When I tested the Automator workflow on a small sample, I realized that some movies were so popular that some other site, not the IMDB page, showed up as the first hit. So I explicitly added +imdb to each movie name, just to be sure. Then I turned each one into a link with another set of search-and-replaces.

Next step was to open the resulting list of links in Safari, and turn the first Automator action on it. This action had three steps:

Get Current Webpage from Safari -> Get Link URLs from Webpages -> New Safari Document.

This opened 50 new windows, in alphabetical order. Then I used the next workflow I’d figured out, which consisted of:

Get Current Webpage from Safari -> Copy to Clipboard (which copies the results of the previous action, or the IMDB address I needed) -> Set Contents of TextEdit Document (by appending) -> Run AppleScript (which was tell application "Safari" to close the front window" – an important step for working back through the 50 windows) -> Loop 51 times.

I actually had to reverse-sort the original list, because once I did the second step, I had a list of addresses with no way to tell, without opening them in a browser again, which movie they represent. IMDB uses a string of numbers for their webpages, not something human-readable, like, say, Wikipedia. But using Wikipedia had it’s own problems, which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

The final step took me a bit to come up with, but was pretty simple once I’d figured it out. Again, a programmer could write code that would string together each part of the link and spit out a fully-formed URL: front-half-of-IMDB-link + Movie Title + closing-tag.

What I did, instead, was copying each list into a spreadsheet (I used Google’s free online one), each type to a column, then exported it as a text file. A quick search-and-replace to remove all the tabs from the tab-delimited list, and ta-da! I had my linked list.

I think, now, that I know enough to write a simple AppleScript to run each Automator workflow, but I’m not sure how to automate the final step. Still, it’s a significant savings in time and effort.

If you start noticing lots of linked lists on my blog, now you’ll know why.