The bee hives next to our chalet in a French ski resort are buzzing with activity, due to the very nice spring weather. No flowers in sight though, just melting snow.
One landed right in front of me on the balcony’s edge.
Category: Day to Day
Groot Brittannië
Daughter got a new inflatable beach ball. The previous didn’t survive a game of ‘tennis’ that involved a stick as racket. This one is also a globe. When I came home she ran to me showing it and out of the blue said “it shows the entire world, it even has Great Britain.” Don’t know where she got it from or why it was important to her, but she very clearly articulated Groot Brittanië, which sounds like Great Brittaniá in Dutch.
Reading Outlook MSG files with attachments on Mac
A client sent me a batch of e-mail messages with attachments as part of collecting material for a study. Those e-mail messages were sent as attachments themselves, as MSG files. This is an Outlook format that can’t easily be opened by other mail clients, not even with Outlook for Mac online discussions suggest. To get at the attachments hidden in those MSG formatted files I looked for a tool to help out.
I found two, where for each I needed the paid version to get at the attachments. One was about a quarter of the costs of the other. So I opted for MSG Viewer Pro, and not MSG Viewer for Outlook. There are a number of online tools, but I don’t want to risk client information that way. There are also one or more open source tools freely available, but it was not immediately obvious I could access and save attachments contained in those MSG files with them. In the end I was glad I opted for the cheapest option, as it turned none of the attachments sent were relevant to my current work.
Rite of passage. Daughter rode her bicycle to daycare today for the first time (at her own suggestion), while I walked behind, and guided her at the roundabout and crossings. Of course she had cycled far further already, but going to daycare on a bike seemed a different achievement to her, as it was not an outing to the park e.g. but a different way of doing a daily routine.
We chained her bicycle to the fence and went inside.
This post by Tanya Reilly describes well the role I regularly have, and what I’ve been talking to a relatively new colleague about to explain how slow and in circles things often seem to move. Side Quests is an apt and more fun description, so I think we should adopt it.
Projects get blocked for reasons that aren’t obvious.
Understanding why can feel like a ridiculous side quest in a point and click adventure game. You need to ask exactly the right questions of exactly the right people before anyone volunteers the one piece of information that will get you closer to the golden idol so you can challenge the Swordmaster to a duel. Or, you know, whatever your local organisational equivalent is.
Today was the first time I had to be really cross with our little one. With a friend she had used a set of color markers to not just draw on the board intended for it, but everywhere else in her room as well. The door, the walls, the floor, lightswitches, all the furniture such as her bed including the sheets, the lamps and her piggy bank, the Sonos speaker, the toys in her room, and the poster frames on her wall. The door and the wall can’t be cleaned and will need a new coat of paint at some point. The rest luckily could be wiped clean quickly.
