THE BONES HAVE SPOKEN

Another quick update - hope everyone has made it from Substack.

Wrote some trash code for a trash problem

My partner was griping about what sounded like a problem that should have been solved in, I don't know, 1997: mail merge.

For those fortunate enough not to have had to deal with mass emailing, you probably have (willing or unwilling) been subject to a few. Given this, you might expect that the process of:

1. Send the same email to this list of people
2. Make them slightly personal - use the person's name, maybe an attachment is slightly different.

...would be extremely well trod ground.

Well a combination of constraints - a number of interational organizations or whole-ass countries (China) wanting nothing to do with Google, Microsoft seeming lack of interest in supporting this functionality in online Outlook, the administrative pain of signing up/learning a new service like Mailgun - resulted in my partner staring down several hours of manually creating/sending some 125 emails.

Call it empathy, boredom, a desire to help/not hear about the problem again, whatever - I decided to write some code about it.

I won't bore everyone with the details but my slapped together trash code managed to at least partially solve a bit of this^[1] and for that I felt relatively happy.

For the record, that now makes the last two pieces of code I wrote, in chronological order, (1) this, and (2) a thing that randomly chooses an online game that one friend group would play at a time we were lucky enough to have three good ones around.

Languages are chaos and that is good

I said goodbye to my full time French course at the YMCA this week and bonjour to an even longer full time French course at Université du Quebec à Montreal (UQAM).

There was a little sadness saying goodbye to some of the people I had been spending a lot of time with over the last four weeks. I took the oral and written tests early (doing "okayish" on the former and I may never know how well I did at the latter). I did leave my email with the pair I was always partnered up with, in case they wanted to practice speaking in a cafe some time. I certainly need it.

It became quite clear on the first day that the UQAM class is remedial for me and four other folks that joined^[2]. The professor insisted the coursework will catch up with my listening/speaking ability in two weeks.

Another difference from the YMCA is this is being taught by an official employee of the Ministry for Immigration or - and this is fun to say if you can pull it off - "Ministère de l'Immigration, de la Francisation et de l'Intégration". Because of that, I'm anticipating much more Quebecois French, which is distinct from french-from-France itself and all of which are distinct from the stuff they are cooking in Africa.

How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time

More than 60 percent of French speakers now live in Africa. Despite growing resentment at France, Africans are contributing to the evolution and spread of the French language.

The New York TimesBy

And I mention all of that to say: I am pro language chaos. It's good and cool that "literally" in English is a term that has been reversed based on context.

Hell you read this far, here are some Good Boys/Girls

Awesome Games Done Quick is a speedrunning event that raises money for charity (Medicins Sans Frontiers, etc). This year they had a dog player:

"Well, he's had a deathless run before but it was with a big
time loss. He had an itchy belly, you see."

Meanwhile this fucking idiot can't chill out long enough to let her stitches heal.

1. The actual sending was blocked by an uncooperative domain-based email service that is being used until something more permanent is set up. ↩︎
2. Less so for me than the others, who speak French quite well. I could use more practice, and anyway, I'm literally being paid to take the class. ↩︎