My spinach salad smoothie

My wife and children think I'm disgusting. I think what I did was genius. Maybe I'll be the disgusting genius?

I took leftover spinach/strawberry salad, put it in the blender with some Naked Juice Blue Machine, watched it turn completely green (which caused my wife to comment on how disgusting it was), threw in a few ice cubes, and viola!  Salad through a straw.  And it tasted GREAT.  

I know people have been putting spinach, broccoli and other veggies in their smoothies for a while.  But this was the first time I took what was otherwise a perfectly fine salad (with some slivered almonds as well) and drank it.  

I'm inspired.  I love my Vita-mix, and for a long time wanted to try a full week of nothing but smoothies/juices and this may just be the kickoff that I need.  I think the next experiment is a full 1-pound bag of spinach with some berries.  

Mac Love with CD recovery

Our babysitter gave us a CD of pictures of our children, but the CD was scratched.  And our babysitter has shipped off to join the Navy, so realistically there is no way of getting another one burned until later this year.

So I tried some CD recovery.  Of course I Googled for it but the best result was for a product called AnyReader, which was Windows only.  I tried it, and it hung and got stuck and recovered only the first 5 files or so (which were easily read by the OS).

So after some more Googling, I found a way to do this on my Mac.  Here's what I did:

• Installed Darwinports from http://darwinports.com
  
• Installed ddrescue from http://ddrescue.darwinports.com/
  
• Identified the mount point of the cd with:  $ mount
• You can also find this information with: $ sudo dmesg
• Unmounted the CD with:  $ sudo umount /dev/disk5s0
• Ran ddrescue with: $ ddrescue -v -b 2048 /dev/disk5s0 diskimage.dmg logfile

Prior to getting it to work, I did have to kill the Finder copy going on, which was just kill -9 pid where pid was the process ID for the Finder process itself.  If you use top -u -s10 you can see the process, or I generally use ps -ax | grep Finder which shows the Finder process and your grep request

Then I went to sleep.  And I woke the next morning to find a mostly recovered CD.  I was very pleased with the results.

My Mac rocks!

Outlook efficiency

I'm back on Outlook at work, and yes, I really, really miss Gmail as my work e-mail, but that's a topic for a different day.  One thing that I find really productive about GMail is the single key to archive a message ('y' for those of you keeping score).

So how can I do this in Outlook 2007?   I'll give you the code, but you'll have to monkey with the Macro security settings (now that they are already set up, I can't reproduce the steps until I try this on somebody else's machine, which I will do shortly).

First, create a folder where you are going to move all of your mail.  I call mine "Archive".

Then go to "Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor"

Then type the following code in:

Option Explicit
Sub MoveItems()
Dim Messages As Selection
Dim Msg As Object ' Since we can't be sure what has been selected.
Dim NamSpace As NameSpace

    Set NamSpace = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")

    Set Messages = ActiveExplorer.Selection

    If Messages.Count = 0 Then

        Exit Sub

    End If

    For Each Msg In Messages

      If (Msg.Class = olMail) Or _

      (Msg.Class = olMeetingRequest) Or _

      (Msg.Class = olMeetingResponseNegative) Or _

      (Msg.Class = olMeetingCancellation) Or _

      (Msg.Class = olMeetingResponsePositive) Then 

          Msg.Move NamSpace.Folders("Mailbox - David Pinkus").Folders("Archive")

      End If

    Next

End Sub

PLEASE Replace the "Mailbox - David Pinkus" above with your actual mailbox name.  It's usually pretty obvious from the folder structure.

Also, I only included a few other types above, you may get items that you also want to move.  I included the elaborate constant names for readability, in case I wanted to do something else with these objects.  

So you're almost done.   Save what you did and return to Outlook.

Then go to "Tools > Customize" and choose the "Commands" tab.   You should see your Macro listed.  Click and drag it to one of your toolbars where it will become a button.  

I rename mine to "Muuve" and put an ampersand in front of the first "u" so that the button becomes "Muuve".  Then  you can simply press Alt-U and move the message to your Archive folder.

I'm still getting a "Macro warning" the first time I run it during a session, but will eventually get around to fixing that...