The weather was terrible for plane-spotting, so I didn’t even bother to go and watch Air Force One land at Miramar. Plus, I’m saving my PTO for when we start to get LH service to KSAN (next week, I think!). How can you tell that I am a boring person? Because upon learning about direct service from my city to FRA and imagining a trip to Germany, instead of having the next step in my thinking be “…and once at FRA get on another plane to Berlin” or “…and once at FRA get on another plane to Hamburg and finally go and see Miniatur Wunderland in person,” I am thinking, “…and then I could take the schnell train to the Strassenbahn to Bonn!”

Linguistic asides:

  1. When I use a German adjective in English, I will never decline it. So I would always say “the schnell train” and never “the schnelle train” (and I’m not even sure if it’s der schnelle Zug because fuck adjective endings). (In den USA, haben wir keine schnellen Züge.)

  2. Also on the matter of transportation, we have this mostly-useless-to-me public transportation option called “the trolley.” Although it travels on the track, it does not fit at all with what I would call a “trolley” (trolleys should be single-car, not have sliding doors, and must have a bell), so when I talk to Jim (who puts up with me), I insist on calling it the Strassenbahn because that is totally what it is.

  3. The other day I bought some fancy greens at Whole Foods, reinforcing my belief that the English word for Feldsalat is mâche, which is to say, I don’t think we have a word in Engish for Feldsalat.

If yesterday had been a successful day at work, I could have written up some sort of professional post explaining how to get postfix on a Mac to authenticate to Gmail’s SMTP so that your shell scripts can send you email that won’t get caught up in your spam filter. But one of my attempts (following Mac-specific directions) did not work at all, and the other attempt (using directions for Ubuntu) led to Gmail bouncing the mail and returning some sort of error code (530, maybe?).

You might think that I could use this free-tier AWS account that I have and do… something that authenticates to a non-spam SMTP server, but you might be overestimating my ability to follow the directions that I find by googling. Also, the main wrinkle here is that I am not allowed to touch the live server, and the test server that I do have access to will only accept connections made from the office IP address, so I would still need to run scripts on my office computer to put together all the information that I want to have in the email.

And then add to that the fact that the crons don’t run on my office computer. Everyone on the internet seems to be saying that Apple doesn’t want me to set a crontab but that the crons should still run, and yet they don’t. So I also spent far too much time yesterday reading about launchd and launchctl.

Apparently Google Sheets can run something called GoogleScript that can send Gmail. I am hoping that I can find some sort of reasonable API that will allow me to transfer the output of my shell script into a Google Sheet and then have the GoogleScript send the email.

Are you yelling at me to give up on the shell script and just do this in AppleScript? I can’t hear you.