Linda Davenport

Holidays as a child were mostly standard for us. We would go to each of our grandparents and enjoy big meals with family. My Aunt Linda would drive in from Georgia almost every year. My brother and I would badger her for hours to play Go Fish. I don't know if she enjoyed playing with us, but I loved it.

I talked with her recently about coming to visit her some weekend. However, we waited too long. I learned this morning that she died last night. The first thing I thought of was playing cards with her when I was a kid.

As I get older I grow even more fond of those simple memories, and I regret not having videos and pictures of those times to remind me of every little detail.

Eagles - Hotel California

Saving Time

I recently found myself needed to rename a bunch of files in a fairly repetitive way. Many files, similar changes, but different enough to require visual inspection.

After doing the first set manually, I thought it would be easy to write a script to handle it, but that seemed like overkill. My next thought was to use BBEdit and regular expressions to manipulate the files.

BBEdit has two features that made this much easier than I expected.

• Apply Text Transform
  • Found in the Text menu "Apply Text Transform..." is a feature that lets you manipulate text in one or more files in a programatic way. In my case I added line numbers to the front of a list of file names.
• Pattern Playground
  • Found in the Search menu "Pattern Playground" is a great tool for testing regular expressions against your current text. Once you have perfected your expressions you can use them in to find and replace text in your document.

I used these tools to prepend line numbers, then change the text to a list of unix move commands with the line number replacing part of the destination file name.

There are so many features in BBEdit that I haven't used, but I continue to find it to be better than fancier code editors that I have paid more money to use.

Arcade Fire - Ready To Start

Romeo Void - Present Tense

The Bangles - Going Down to Liverpool

Infected Mushroom - Suliman

Gorillaz - Cracker Island

The Marias - Hush

Fun Boy Three - Our Lips Are Sealed