Schinckel.net

I’m in a situation where I need to send out large numbers of emails – now, settle down, I’m not talking Spam! Rather, I am the Member Communication/Liason Officer for a sporting organisation, and need to send many emails out to either a subset of the community, or in some cases, the whole community. I’m thinking about different methods to streamline my communication processes. I think I have a few options: Mail.app and Address Book. Using the Groups feature of Address Book, I can send out emails to the right combination of people who need to receive them. For instance, I can have a Men’s Open group, a Women’s Open group, a Juniors group (not really required anymore), a coaches group, a committee group and so on. This should work pretty well, but will require me to have all of the up-to-date information in Address Book. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I need to ensure that Word/Excel can use this as a source (we have some custom generated forms that need to be populated), or custom-generate some sort of interface solution. Perhaps I should add extra fields to Address Book, and use that as my database. The other option is to go the whole hog and create a Database (MySQL, or something similar) that I can use to store the data in. Ideally I’d like to have an online one, as then I can access it from work if I need to. Otherwise, I’ll only be able to send out emails and so on when at home. That is the big disadvantage of the first solution. The other possible disadvantage of this method is that with a large number of emails, I may look like a Spammer. Which brings me to the other option – a dedicated mass-emailer. Of course, this itself may make me look like a Spammer – emails may be rejected just because they use a particular X-Mailer: header, or something strange like that. A better solution might be to custom-roll an AppleScript solution that generates individual emails from a list. This could be a goer. Kind of like a Mail-Merge, but and Email-Merge. I’d like to be able to do this as an Apple Mail plugin, but a stand-alone app might be easier. Then I can write it in AppleScript Studio. I’m liking the sound of this: extend Address Book so it has (for instance) Coach, Referee and Selector fields (for an indication of NCAS/ATA Accreditation level) and so on, and combine this with some fancy AppleScripting to allow for personalised emails, and generation of reports. Next week, maybe. When I’ve finished writing all of the Year 12 SARs.

Google.Oz (in reality, google.com.au) has a special Melbourne Cup image: After my last rantpost, this bugs me too.

I’ve never understood the fascination Australians have with horse racing in general, and the Melbourne Cup specifically. Mind you, I’m not a real big fan of motor racing for that matter either. Anyway, back to “the sport of kings.” My sister is a Vet, and races Pacers (which, I just learned a week or so ago, are different to Trotters), and obviously she and her husband are kind-of into horse racing. Whenever I’ve been out drinking and horse racing has been happening, (like at Dan’s bucks night, and Sam’s bucks night, and so on) I’ll ring Tish and ask her for a tip. Either she doesn’t have good tips for normal horse racing, or just likes feeding me duds, as none of them have ever come in. Back when I was teaching swimming lessons we used to have lunch at the pub every day, and have a bet or two on the horsies, but I was never really that into it. When we go to the easter races at Oakbank I’ll follow Marion’s tips, but that’s only because they tend to win. I think that’s what it comes down to. I don’t mind doing it when I win, but I think I’m realistic enough to understand that I’m not going to win in the long run, and don’t even consider putting a large bet on, even if there’s a chance to make a lot of money. I just don’t have enough of a gambler’s streak for that to be an appealing option. I’m not really into gambling at all, come to think of it. Pokies seem like a waste of time – I’d rather put my money into a video game machine where you get to shoot stuff, rather then just push buttons and rely on dumb luck. Maybe it helps that I’ve never really won any money in gambling. Perhaps if I’d won a bit on my first time, I might have become a gambler. Maybe not. Even when we went to the pub in Sydney a year or so ago, Andy and Dan played the pokies – I played ‘Big Deer Hunter’. One of the other guys won some serious money. I wasn’t jealous at all – I knew I probably wouldn’t have. Moving onto a related topic, I was watching Episode 5 of Lost Season 2 last night – the episode where Hurley remembers winning the lotto, and how his friend basically became jealous of him, and just walked away. I don’t know that I’d be jealous of someone else winning millions of dollars in the lotto. I guess because I’d never enter it myself, I like to think I’d feel happy for them. Back onto horse (and motor) racing. I fail to identify these as sports. Sport is about major physical activity. Fitness and the like. Which these, IMHO aren’t. Reminds me: I’m making my Men’s Open Touch comeback tonight. I wish I was fit.