The new balance

I keep seeming to bump into these today. Here's a good one:

"For I know the plans I have for you" declares our Lord Jesus Christ, "they are plans to prosper you, to give you a hope and a future and not to destroy you."

That's from the Book of Jeremiah Chapter 29, verse 11.

According to Wikipedia, Jeremiah had a happy early life, but has come to be known by scholars as the "weeping prophet" due to his rather touching Book of Lamentations, one of the four he wrote in the present day Bible canon. His spiritual role as a prophet was to point out where people were going wrong in their relationship with God and to bring the bad news of God's anger and frustration to the communities who ignored God.

Another good one from Balthazar Gracian. I take this approach with people's production systems...

Aphorism #271 In every Occupation if you know little stick to the safest.

If you are not respected as subtle, you will be regarded as sure. On the other hand, a man well trained can plunge in and act as he pleases. To know little and yet seek danger is nothing else than to seek ruin. In such a case take stand on the right hand, for what is done cannot be undone. Let little knowledge keep to the king's highway, and in every case, knowing or unknowing, security is shrewder than singularity.

You, like me, might be wanting to create MD5 hashes in OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets. You, like me, might be wondering why the OpenOffice repository for Extensions is unusable.

If this is true then like me, you might want a link to the Cryptographic Hash Functions UNO Component for OpenOffice.org, because the extensions site is not working very well at the moment.

I did what anyone would have done and filched the link from Google's cache of the page.

I wanted to put some text before the extension on some files. I had been doing that with a rename regex, matching the extension, then replacing it with extra-bit+the extension. Messy. This is much nicer. Thanks to movingtofreedom.


$ ls
after_1.jpg before_const_1.jpg before_const_3.jpg detail_1.jpg
after_2.jpg before_const1.jpg before_const3.jpg detail_2.jpg
before_1.jpg before_const_2.jpg before_const_4.jpg detail_3.jpg
before_2.jpg before_const2.jpg before_const4.jpg

$ rename 's/(.+?)(\.[^.]*$|$)/$1_sm$2/g' *
$ ls
after_1_sm.jpg before_2_sm.jpg before_const_2_sm.jpg before_const3_sm.jpg detail_1_sm.jpg
after_2_sm.jpg before_const_1_sm.jpg before_const2_sm.jpg before_const_4_sm.jpg detail_2_sm.jpg
before_1_sm.jpg before_const1_sm.jpg before_const_3_sm.jpg before_const4_sm.jpg detail_3_sm.jpg



As you can see, that lovely little regex (With two backreferences, I must say) allowed me to add _sm before each filename extension. As you expect, I batch-resized these images to thumbnail size with the excellent mogrify.

So much for all that "last post" nonsense. As people have been asking, here's a link to my Voice123.com profile, where you can hear me talking in my serious and silly voices.

I'm hoping to get some voiceover work using this as my showreel, so if you know anyone who wants their answerphone message doing (or a nice, long, expensive car commericial would be nice), please send them my details! I'm competing with Harlan Hogan and, naturally John Briggs, self-styled "on-air male" of Weakest Link fame.

I will be posting on my Travel Blog for a while. It is much easier for me to update, simply by sending it e-mail. It's address is simply blog.jdv.me.uk so you can find it and bookmark it easily.

If I think of anything which doesn't relate to travel, and if I have the time, I might still post here. But for the moment, the Travel Blog is the place to be!

Something I found on Quora (try it: you'll love it) which made me think I might be on the right track!

'Weep and you weep alone! - What a lie this is! Weep and you will find a million crocodiles to weep with you. The world is forever weeping. The world is drenched in tears... But joy, joy is a kind of ecstatic bleeding, a disgraceful sort of contentment which overflows from every pore of your being. You can't make people joyous by being joyous yourself. Joy has to be generated by oneself: it is or it isn't. Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood or communicated.

To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.'

-Henry Miller