Anyone who doesn’t use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, and lord knows I dislike that program enough that I wouldn’t use it on my PC, much less the Mac, even though it’s not available for a Mac, has had to deal with a thing called winmail.dat.

In a nutshell, MS Outlook refuses to handle files attachments in a standard fashion, and instead wraps them up into a layer that can’t be opened by other e-mail programs. If an Outlook user sends me an attached file, I likely can’t see it or open in it in Thunderbird.

Here’s a solution:

TNEF’s Enough is a small OS X program which will open the winmail.dat and allow you to extract what’s inside. You can set up Thunderbird to automatically launch it when you receive mail from an Outlook user.

TNEF’s Enough allows Macs to read and extract files from Microsoft TNEF stream files. The files are usually received by SMTP based e-mail programs from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook users.

Unusual for Mac utilities, it’s also free.

One of the great mysteries in my life is where chcken bones come from.

I never wondered about this until I began walking a dog two or three  times a day.

Certainly I know where the bones orginate – indside chickens – but how do they come to be discarded across every inch of everywhere that I travel?
At least twice or three times during each walk Ursula the Wonder Pup will suddenly dip her head down into the grass or bushes, or to the pavement, and come up with a hearty “Crunch Crunch Crunch.”

In theory chicken bones are not a good thing for a dog to eat. In practice I have given up sticking my hand in her mouth to try and extract them. At this point she’s eaten at least a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet’s worth of chicken bones, with no obvious problems, so why bother.

But still I wonder: where do all of these bones come from? Are there hundreds of people in this town who throw chicken bones out their back window instead of putting them in the garbage?

Why would they do that? It makes no sense. If I was walking the alley beside a KFC outlet I would expect lots of discarded bones, but on a winding suburban street? On the steps of a library? In the middle of a parking lot at the Wal Mart?

Are rats or wild animals scavenging them from garbage cans and leaving them hither and yon through the landscape? Is there a subculture of teens who mark their territory by planting chicken bones in unusual places?

Are aliens landing here and eviscerating chickens as part of some grand scheme to take over the earth?

And ultimately, is all of this connected somehow to the random porkchop and BBQ rib bones that we find?

The joys of automated advertising – let the computer decide which ad should go where…

Then again, maybe Paris is from Gimli?

One of these people is the nephew of the President of the United States.

And son of Neil Bush, kid brother to George W.

Not to question the judgment of young Pierce Mallon, but he:

a) attended this party

b) allowed this picture to be taken

and c) posted it on his own web page!

I hope and pray that he doesn’t continue the family destiny by getting elected to the White House. Who knows, they could be invading Liechtenstein* next.

(Late Breaking Report: For the uninformed, the tranny pictured is Austin celebrity and often candidate-for-mayor Leslie, who can be found on any given night on 6th. If Pierce has Leslie on his side, then he might as well fast track himself into the Governor’s office. )

* Whoohoo! Turn on your speakers for fine Liechtensteinien music!

It’s frustrating. The Mac does wireless networking flawlessly, if a bit arrogantly. Still, once you have set up a connection it will always be found and opened up with no thought or action.

So why does the Apple have so much trouble with printing?

I move between two primary locations, and have a printer profile set up for each. Why can’t the Mac also figure out what printer is connected, maybe based on my network connection, and make that the default?

Why is it that when I get to my office I need to manually change the printer to “HP Deskjet” and when I get home I need to manually change it back to “Brother”?

And, once again, can someone get Apple explain what the heck this error message is about? It still confuses me.

As reported in David Akin’s blog yesterday, and everywhere else this morning, a staggering 230 – or is 300?.. or more than 300? – cars drove across the Canadian border without being stopped and searched in the last six months.

The most quoted comment comes from Liberal Senator Tommy Banks, who said “”I think most Canadians would be surprised, shocked and unhappy to learn that 300 vehicles in a half a year drive across the border and aren’t stopped and somehow get away with it.”

Personally I think that most Canadians are smart enough to see this as pure unadulterated scaremongering.

The number 230 (300 cars, 70 of which were caught by police) is meaningless unless you know how many cars cross the border in six months.

If you missed 230 cars out of say 1000, then yes, you have a significant problem.

If you missed 230 cars out of a million you might think that this is not a big concern.

There were actually 70 million border crossings last year. Which means that .00086% of cars are crossing illegally. And many of them are reportedly not terrorists, just confused tourists making a wrong turn.

Risk assessment is about finding a balance, determining what is a reasonable level of risk, not about eliminating every possible risk in all circumstances.

If the senators involved are “shocked” and “infuriated” by this, then surely they should also be up in arms about several even more dangerous threats to Canadian lives – like drowning, which offers a 1 in 83,000 chance of killing you, or being killed while walking as pedestrian, which offers a 1 in 43,000 chance.

As inflammatory as these Senators may be, we also need to look at the media. How did they describe this infinitesimal problem?

Toronto Star: Senators aghast vehicles cross border unchecked

National Post: Undefended border offers little impediment to illegal crossings

Toronto Sun: Most ‘port-runners’ elude capture

Globe and Mail: Hmmm… doesn’t seem to be there.

Of the papers listed only the Sun bothered to mention the total number of crossings each year.

Kudos though to the Calgary Sun for the rather more sensible headline: Fleeing traffic miffs border experts

Found via marktd.

In a world filled with Stephen Harper and George Bush and discrimination and hate and greed it’s easy to become cynical and jaded.

Indeed, the Powers that Be, whether global or in your own back yard, want you to believe that you are powerless to change the things around you. That powerlessness, and the techniques that can be used to create it, are well documented and worth examination.

Which is why, today, I offer a reminder that there are a lot of simple things that you can do to make your world a little nicer, a little more beautiful, and a little more gentle for those who live in it.

I had just rushed kids to school, and wound up walking back home because the bus schedules simply made it faster to walk than to wait for connections. I was tired, and probably a little annoyed with the chaos and rush in my life.

I came around a corner, not four blocks from home, and found what is pictured here.

I love that someone took the time and effort to plant roses around a telephone pole. It’s fun, and nice to look at, and is sure to brighten your day.

And if it’s also probably illegal, well, that’s just a nice bonus!

Check out the always great Dilbert blog for a commentary on the assassination death of al-Zarqawi. Yes, this is actually a marketing opportunity!

al-Zarqawi has achieved martyrdom (a good thing for Al-Qaeda) and the alleged “traitor” who turned him in now has a cool 25 mil to finance further Al-Qaeda work (also a good thing!)

Adams suggests: “Instead of offering $25 million reward for some al-kuhday supporter to become a traitor, we restate the proposition in more positive terms (marketing!). We offer to donate $25 million to al-quayduh if one of the noble jihadists will assist Bin Laden in achieving martyrdom.

We wouldn’t have to actually pay the $25 million. We could just drop a 500 pound bomb on the guy that tries to collect it. Some would call that unethical, but there’s a fine line between bombing and marketing. “

I am registered at a lot of websites, and am accustomed to the standard opt-out checkboxes which offer to send me “occasional e-mail about our products, special deals, and other items that we feel will interest you.”

I always check them off and consequently don’t get more corporate junk mail than I want.

Today though I found a new and unpleasant spin on opt-out clauses when a young friend registered with a Mattel company web site called EverythingGirl.com.

When she registered she was asked for a nickname, a password, an e-mail address, plus the e-mail address of a parent. The latter seemed like a good and prudent idea until I received a message which included the following:

In other words, the only way that a child can enjoy the Mattel web site – which, let’s face it, is primarily a marketing tool – is to also be bombarded with Mattel spam. Unlike most adult oriented web sites which allow you the option of not getting spammed, this site aimed at young girls makes spam mandatory.

Of course the whole Mattel Barbie culture is one that distresses me, and which encourages attitudes in young women that should have been abandoned fifty years ago, but this is still one step beyond the everyday irritation that Mattel causes me.

Oh yes, this could get me into podcasting….

From Andrew Sullivan’s blog, via Wonkette…

No, podfisking not some bizarre sexual practice indulged by Norm and Midge. It’s just a podcast version of a fisking. A fisking – a term derived from the many times bloggers have dissected the deranged writing of Robert Fisk – is a genre that takes a text by someone else, and responds to it sentence by sentence, point by point. As I listened to the president’s radio address this week on the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage, I got the idea. Who better to be my first podfisk subject? Why not fisk via audio? So I spliced his speech with my responses on Apple’s GarageBand program. Voila: a podfisk.

Listen here.

Image swiped from courtesy Wonkette. Really, I have no strong opinions on PETA, or even on bullfighting for that matter, but gosh almighty are these kids cute. They were part of today’s PETA sponsored “Running of the Nudes.”

Can you imagine anyone in Washington DC having more fun than these kids did while protesting in front of the Spanish Embassy against the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona?

Then again, can you imagine this protest in January?

My… what would Hemingway say…

While listening to news coverage of the alleged “terrorist” bomb maker arrests over the weekend I’ve been struck by how much guesswork, conjecture , and generalization I’ve heard.

TV newscasts and newspapers are quoting each other as sources, and both repeat Police statements more or less verbatim. Two stories on the CBC site actually contradict each other, with one saying:

Police will not disclose the intended targets of the alleged attacks, confirming only that the Toronto Transit Commission’s subway lines were not on the list.

But according to the Globe and Mail, the targets included political and economic symbols including the Parliament Buildings and Peace Tower in Ottawa, along with the CN Tower and Toronto Stock Exchange in Toronto.

The downtown Toronto office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was also reported as a possible target.

And another saying:

The CN Tower was also unlikely because it is made of reinforced concrete, a substance that is noticeably hard to blow up, said John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based think-tank.

“For example, [consider] the Hiroshima attack in 1945. The reinforced concrete buildings at the Hiroshima memorial were right underground ground zero, and they’re still there,” Thompson told Canadian Press.

The House of Commons was also unlikely, if only because the suspected terrorists were in southern Ontario.

At least CBC is upfront enough to admit that coverage has been characterized as follows “There have been plenty of leaks from sources, but not many of them have been publicly confirmed at this point.”

On the three tonnes of fertilizer, the Globe says that “Police would not say where this three-tonne batch came from.”

CBC says that “The Toronto Star reported that police actually sold the suspects a harmless chemical that only looked like ammonium nitrate.”

One report says that the cops sold these guys fake fertilizer, another that it was real, and no report tells me whether three tonnes (also reported as three pallets) is in fact an amount that an average farmer might order. (and yes, there are dark skinned farmers, even in southern Ontario.)

All of this confusion and sensationalism (Can we say Oklahoma just one more time?) leads me to an interesting article at The Register, a tech site out of Britain.

Titled “Homebrew chemical terror bombs, hype or horror?” it examines and debunks coverage of a similar raid in the UK, pointing out inaccuracies and sometimes complete fiction in reporting. Well worth the time it takes to read.

Via CanadianJournalist.ca, a report that one Vancouver radio station is going for all traffic report format for at least part of the day.

Broadcaster Magazine reports that:

In a completely unique and innovative format, AM730 Continuous Drive Time Traffic and the Best of Talk delivers continuous traffic reports during the critical morning and afternoon drive periods. …

“Appealing to a targeted and highly mobile audience, this new and groundbreaking continuous traffic format fills a void in the Vancouver market. Imagine never having to wait for a traffic report during the prime drive times,” said JJ Johnston, General Manager, Corus Radio Vancouver…

Of course, when during rush hour are the major arteries in Toronto or Vancouver not jammed solid? Do you really need the radio to tell you that you’re moving at 3 MPH?

Following up on a previous post on this Important Issue, we direct you to the organization ProMom Inc, who are battling blog site LiveJournal for the right to have members use lactating breast pictures as user images.

POPULAR BLOGGING SITE RESTRICTS USE OF BREASTFEEDING PHOTOS
LiveJournal cites breastfeeding images as ‘inappropriate’ and sends mothers to the virtual restroom

Women on the popular blog site LiveJournal are calling foul at the company’s decision to brand images of breastfeeding as ‘inappropriate.’ Many users of the site have joined together to urge LiveJournal’s parent company SixApart to address their concerns and reevaluate the policy.

Check out the “gallery” of forbidden icons here.