Tag: email

Categories
National politics

What Is A Billion

I got a forwarded email about putting some perspective on what “a Billion” is and how easily politicians throw around numbers on that order of magnitude. Here’s a summary from the email that attempts to put some perspective on the “one billion” figure:

    • A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
    • A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
    • A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
    • A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
    • A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division. Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number, what does it mean?

    • Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.
    • Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
    • Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

The first two numbers got me thinking because if it was 1959 a billion seconds ago then it was 1000 B.C. a billion minutes ago. It turns out that a billion seconds is 31.7 years (so 1976) and a billion minutes is 1901 years (107 A.D.). If those numbers were calculated in 1992 then the 1959 number would be correct for a billion seconds and the billion minutes would have been nearly 60 years after Jesus died.

Despite that discrepancy, the value of $250 Billion dollars for New Orleans should open our eyes to the sloppy and generous spending practices of Washington. $250 Billion is nearly $1000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. Our government thinks that it can stimulate the entire national economy for less than it would take to rebuild New Orleans ($165 Billion vs $250 Billion). With numbers like that anyone should start being interested in making our government more fiscally conservative.

Categories
technology

Posting Rich Text Email

I have created a hack for wp-mail.php that allows rich text emails to be processed. I call it wp-mail-rich. To use it you simply copy the wp-mail-rich.php file in the folder where WordPress is installed (where the wp-mail.php
file is) and use wp-mail-rich.php in place of wp-mail.php. If you have a cron job, just point it to the new file. To rollback just point it back to the old file.

I have also included some files that I used to test and develop this – in case anyone wanted to make further modifications. Instructions are in the readme.txt file.

Download wp-mail-rich.

I have only tested this with Gmail so it is possible that other rich text emails might not be exactly right coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, or your company mail server. Let me know if this is the case.

Categories
meta technology

Post by Email

I finally have the Post-by-Email working in WordPress. There is one catch – the body of the post only shows up if the message is sent in plain text. No “rich formatting” or other high-and-mighty “My email client is better than what was available 15 years ago” shenanigans.

Add this to the fact that I have to go edit the post later if I want it anywhere but the default category, or if I want to add tags or anything else besides text, and you can be sure that I will only use email as a place to compose posts that are still in the formative stages. I will also be looking at other plugins with more versatility in this department.

Enough griping, it’s still a new feature for me so this may be a small step, but it’s a forward step.

Update: There is another catch – extra line breaks show up when posting this way – definitely not for regular use.