Islamophobes я Us....

Someone I know recently received an e-mail that discussed a "boycott" of "the new Muslim Eid stamp". I'm sure that all of the folks who continue to propagate these BS chain e-mails love their country and "their religion", but there are so many holes in this e-mail that it needs to quickly sink to a watery grave. Besides, this stamp has been around since 2001.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/stamps/eidstamp.asp
https://supplies.usps.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10052&productId=10006182&langId=-1

To borrow a favorite line from a twisted book...

Don't Panic!!!

In closing, with religiophobic myths like this continuing and idiots like the Dove World Outreach Center and their little event planned for 9/11/10 (I think these folks are so idiotic that I won't even link to them), we are entirely too close to a point where the 9/11 attackers have achieved what I believe was their true goal: fomenting that "war between the civilizations"...

I was just browsing around here....

and I stumbled across this document. Very interesting reading! I'm sure there's much more interesting stuff on the MERLN site, but the section on the left side of the page titled "Quick Links to U.S. Policy Statements - MiPALs" is a good start.

So there I was...

I had a few PDFs on-hand that I wanted to back up but save on my local machine as text files. There are a number of ways to do this, but the easiest (and cheapest) way was to get Xpdf from here. One utility program included with Xpdf is pdftotext. I then had to figure out a way to use pdftotext to convert my files in one big batch. Here's what I did. First, I dragged all 575 of the desired files to the directory where pdftotext.exe was located. Next, I used the command prompt (under Vista, Start->Run->cmd) dir to make a list of all the PDF files in the directory (dir *.pdf /b > list). As for batching the file conversion, I then used the FOR command included with the cmd program. Here's the applicable syntax:

for /F %i in (list) DO pdftotext %i

Worked like a champ! The files I converted were mostly text, so they were fairly conducive to conversion. Besides, this freed up about 60 MB on my hard drive. Not a lot by today's standards, but I can keep a few more pictures or MP3s now...

Seasonal produce tips from Kraft for ya...