[Paisleychick-lj] A project that takes longer than it should, never!

[Want to know about me?]

I want to keep in contact with people and it's a bit difficult. Last week I thought of a good idea to create a mailing list and use [RSS2Email][1] (which Aaron Swartz wrote) to send people emails whenever I post a new entry to my blog. In order to do this, I need to go through my address book and create a list of people to invite. That means I need to go through my Mail.app program, which I have migrated away from and look at the semi-hany "previous recipients" feature. This lists all previous recipients and shows you if they are in the Mac address book or not. You can either "remove from list" or "add to address book", but you can't export them to a text file. I was going through and adding people to my address book. I was powering through and up to the N's. Then disaster struck. I accidentally erased everyone. I'm not sure how I did that, but I did. I must have clicked on a dialog box without thinking. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Breathe, try not to panic. What can be done? Undo doesn't work. Backups, what about backups. Ah hah! I put everything on my ipod. I turned on iTunes and looked in my preferences folder for ipod preferences, none. Hrm, I guess they messed with things in iTunes 7. Okay. I plug in my ipod and before I can get to the preferences it automatically synchs and erases my backup! Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit! [![[info]][2]][3][**kragen**][4] pointedly and _very_ unhelpfully tells me that that's what I get for using proprietary software. That this wouldn't have happened if I had kept my address book in a text format and backed up with CVS to a server. (That's bullshit, you can still accidentally blow away files using *nix, I should know....) I pointedly tell him that "suggestions" such as these are **not** what I need to hear at the moment. He gets it. He takes a look at my data and sees that there is a specific file a while back called "AddressBook.data.beforesave". It's from 2005. We copy that data into "AddressBook.data" and it works, but it's not good enough, as I know a lot of that information is old and I don't have anyone's information from May 2005 on. Suck. What can I do? More backups. Ah hah! I carefully did backup my computer onto my firewire drive back in Bolinas in September. I write a frantic email to my parents asking them to email me specific files. Well, turns out my father's still in Romania and will be for another six weeks, so he can't help out there, BUT my mum is willing to give it a shot, in a bit. Great! I can wait. No problem. I get an email from my brother the next day telling me that he's compressed each file in the folder I want and uploaded it to his mac.com page. Okay, that will work just fine, but that means that everyone's data is on the web. I download all the files, copy them onto my USB key that [![[info]][2]][3][**kragen**][4] bought me in Ecuador, and eventually bring that back to the hotel and my laptop. Hopefully he already deleted it all by now. I go through my "previous recipients" feature again in Mail.app and carefully add people I know to the address book. Then, I go through and clean up all 600 contacts, merging contacts where I have duplicates, deleting contacts when I have *no* idea who they are and generally keeping house. I also spend a lot of time going through my email and finding people's information that they have sent out in various invitations. Finally, I see a use for keeping so much of my email. Also finally, I am able to make a list of people that I want to send an email to inviting them to read my blog. Two days to complete the first part of a project. Now, I have to install and configure RSS2email, set all the correct preferences with the mailing list [![[info]][2]][3][**kragen**][4] made for me using Mailman, do some experiments to make sure I've set everything up correctly and then I can send out the email I wrote last night. I now have to figure out how to send 250 individual emails. I don't want to "bcc" everyone, because it's likely to get caught in a spam filter and some people set up their mail to only read things that are "to" them because they get *so much* email.   
  
FWIW, I have used Addressbook's feature of creating a backup (1). I have also used "Address Book Exporter" and exported my contacts to a text file (2). I have also synched up my contacts on ipod and made sure that the "synch" button is not clicked by default. That's a bit of a pain in the ass, but it's a workaround for now (3). I also copied both the addressbook backup file and the exported file just as files to my ipod (4). I then also copied those files onto my USB drive (5). Paranoid, yeah, I think so, but I don't want to loose all my contacts again. That sucked. I just have to remember to redo this process about once a month so I have multiple copies. Whew.

   [1]: http://rss2email.infogami.com
   [2]: http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif
   [3]: http://kragen.livejournal.com/profile
   [4]: http://kragen.livejournal.com/

URL: http://paisleychick.livejournal.com/261778.html