Holy Moly

_
The master said to his slave, "Go out on the streets and 
bring back whomever you find to have dinner."

~From Saying #64 of The Gospel of Thomas
_

That's how some people seem to show up unexpectantly in other people's lives. They're the grinning idiots the slave returns with to take the place of the more desirable guests who have shunned and angered the Master by or with faint praise. 

Anybody can feel better to give rather than receive, that is, if they got something to give. If they look past their greed and avarice, everybody got something to give away or will get it. If for no other reason than just to receive the blessings associated with the fabled widow's mite. People give stuff away they don't actually need to get a blessing they don't need from a bum who has nothing but false gratitude to offer as a "Thank you very much, indeed!" are probably going to hell in some demon's sound-proof handbasket anyway, them what don't will turn into a pillow of salt. 

If I model people who only express with their thoughts and behaviors those attributes they themselves modeled from other people who in turn modeled they stuff from still other people... Where's the beef in this hamburger? All the so-called holy books of wisdom appear to suggest one get off this train of events and find a non-human to model one's behavior upon, and promptly declare some men gods to get around that obstacle.

The e-mail discussion group I subscribed to recently that's run from an Apple web site about AppleScript is really stimulating me to devote time to learning more about how to read and write scripts. The approach I'm using is totally receptive. I haven't written a reply to the group. I don't know enough to ask a question. I read the contents of every post, paying especial attention to reading the scripts and trying to understand why and how they get the results they do, or not get.

It's in this arena I seem to be making some progress. Today, I read this guy's post who was inquiring about the AppleScript Dictionary that has to be in each applications that claims to work with AppleScript. The Dictionary in each application is specific to that application, and if the Commands and whatever ain't in a specific application's Dictionary, even though it may be in other applications that use AppleScript, it ain't gwine fly.

I followed his description on my own machine from the Script Editor to it's drop-down menu heading Window and select Library, and in the dialog box that showed up when I click on Library, is a list of all the Dictionaries in all the applications. When I double-click on any one of them, another dialog box will show up with all the commands and their associated keywords that have to be kowtowed to in order for the scripts a scripter codes for that application to work as advertised.

All that from a post from a guy who didn't know what he was doing and asked for help from anybody but me. Yet, he unknowingly helped me over a bump in the learning curve I found sot before me. I was so thrilled I caught on to anything that shows up in that group's mailbox, that I felt like sending him a thank you note, but that would just be too damn weird and over-the-top. That's why I have issues with expressing gratitude. I can easily start babbling about stuff the other (usually a stranger) refuses to accept responsibility for. Jeez! Who could blame them for that?

I tried to register on this forum site called MacScripter and they banned me for life within an hour. That's pretty cold. The first time they banned me was because I used felix as my user name, but I used my legal name and gmail address to register. They sent me a password, but then banned me before I could use it. So, I wrote the webmaster and he decided to give me another chance, but if I screwed up this time, I was banned for life. So, I registered again using my legal name and my gmail address. They sent me another password, but once again banned me when I signed in (this time they even let me sign in as a member before they banned me), and two strikes and I'm out. What a harsh, hard to please bunch of weirdos. Maybe I'm better off without them.

This is what Ray Barber, the administrator of the MacScripter.net web site wrote to excuse his personal decision to ban me due to his extreme paranoia about an easily correctable technicality:

"Not that I feel the need to justify our rules policy, please understand the
reasoning behind it;

First off, we treat board security very seriously. By registering with your
legal, first and last name keeps out the rif-raf."

This eccentric technocrat has decided I'm "rif-raf" simply because I had the audacity to attempt to register at the MacScripter.net site to participate in the group discussions there, and in order to avail myself of the tutorials teaching a scripting language that comes free in every copy of the Mac operating system Apple sells to the general public in plain sight of God and everybody, and then, all of a sudden, this weirdo suit is attacking my ethics and morals as if I might betray the United States or give away military secrets because I wanna learn AppleScript? OMG!

This seems to be the same sort of dismissive mentality I encountered with the Linux crowd a few years ago. They used their need for self-importance and exclusivity to shut people out while pretending to want to help them. Oh, well, there are other sources. Hopefully, not all of them are as paranoid as these folks.
_