File name to FileMaker

I was once told that AppleScript is a read-only language and after much caffeine and gnashing of teeth this morning, I do not disagree at all. All I want to do is paste the name of a selected file into a FileMaker database. Sounds easy, right? Here’s the syntax:

tell application "Finder"
	set theFile to selection
	set TheName to name of (theFile as alias)
end tell
tell application "FileMaker Pro Advanced"
	go to database "Test_Import"
	go to layout "Test_Import"
	set data field "i_file_name" to TheName
	do script "Import Excel file"
end tell

Good night Chet

Friday is “clean up your desktop” day and I’ve been going through a 450 item-filled folder called “Incoming” that’s full of URLs, text file scraps, and ephemera I thought should be filed on the “interesting” spectrum somewhere.

Anyway, since the Oscars are on Sunday and one of my favorite movies of the year (Good Night And Good Luck) is up for some awards here’s a relevant quote from another journalist who succumed from lung cancer.

“It’s a logical assumption that hatred – far left, far right, political, religious, economic, or paranoid – moved the person or persons who today committed this combined act of murder and national sabotage. There is in this country, and there has been for too long, an ominous and sickening popularity of hatred. The body of the President, lying at this moment in Washington, is a thundering testimonial of what hatred comes to and the revolting excesses it perpetrates. Hatred is self-generating, contagious, it feeds upon itself and explodes into violence. It is no inexplicable phenomenon that there are pockets of hatred in our country, areas and communities where the disease is permitted or encouraged or given status by those who can and do influence others. You and I have heard, in recent months, someone say, “Those Kennedys ought to be shot.” A well-known national magazine [The National Review] recently carried an article saying Chief Justice Warren ought to be hanged. In its own defence, it said it was only joking. But the left has been equally bad. Tonight, it might be the hope and resolve of all of us that we’ve heard the last of this kind of talk, jocular or serious, for the result is tragically the same.”

Huntley was talking about the JFK assassination, but he might as well have been talking about the suceeding forty-three years. Good night and good luck indeed.

Cable Airport cafe

Welcome to Cable AirportThe tour of airport cafes continues…

I actually have a past with the Cable Airport cafe. I went to a private high school in Claremont in the very early 80s and when I could get off campus on the weekends, I’d spend the day on my bike and make my usual rounds to one or more of the following: a video arcade – Two-Bit Arcade on Foothill Blvd. and the Montclair Plaza arcade (before it became a Sega Center), a used book store (Adobe Used Books on the corner of Garey and Foothill), Rhino Records in the Claremont Village (the only place to buy records!), the Blue Dragon game shop in Ontario, and the Claremont Computer Center – pretty much the only place in town that had Apple II software and didn’t complain if you hung around talking about the particulars of

Somewhere in the middle of all that I’d stop for lunch somewhere and if I was biking east towards Montclair Plaza or Ontario I’d stop for a burger at the Cable Airport cafe in Upland. Pretty much your straight-up honest diner burger but as with any airport cafe the taste is substantially improved by the buzz of light plane traffic and the other customers gabbing about airplanes.

I hadn’t been back to Cable Airport since then and not surprising at all, it hasn’t changed much at all. Cable Airport is still privately-owned and the cafe, now called Maniac Mike’s, still makes terrific diner food. I opted for the “Cropduster Breakfast” with french toast, bacon, and eggs and a cheerfully infinite cup of coffee. Maybe I just had that look of “you need more coffee” or something. Completely unpretentious, terrific and the real deal. Now I just need to find a set of vintage dishes like what they have.

Breakfast at Cable Airport Caution! Moving Aircraft Cable Airport terminal Cable Airport planes

AirNav on KCCB. Previous blog entries for El Monte Airport, Long Beach Airport, Fullerton Airport, and Hawthorne Airport.

Flying Flying Wing

The Flying Wing & Bond Bread
A chance to see a 60 year old UFO fly doesn’t come by that often, so the big event this weekend was a drive out to the Palm Springs Air Museum to see the original N9M flying wing prototype fly.

The old Northrop flying wings are one of the few planes I still obsess over. I still vividly remember the flying wing scene from the 1953 War Of The Worlds (and the audience in the Orange Theater cheering when L.A. City Hall gets blown up) and getting worked up over something that looked like it stepped off of the front cover of a vintage SF pulp magazine. Cue a lifetime of general obsession over retrofuture technology that was just too ahead of its time to be of any practicality. Somewhere I still have a beat-up poster of the B-49 that lasted through three years of high school dorm living.

N9MB Flying Wing Anyway, one of the few remaining flying wing third-scale prototypes was restored a few years back and makes the occasional flight demo here and there. Even after all the pictures, films, etc. I’ve seen of it, I couldn’t help but sputter out an “illbegoddamned” when it took off.

Here’s the requisite Flickr set from the day and some some short movies I took (pass 1, pass 2, pass 3)

Of course any trip to Palm Springs requires two additional things… Modernism and the Sonny Bono statue.

Palm Springs modernismSonny

Google Earth

There’s a thousand Google Earth snapshot sites, but I really like these two. This is the Rice Valley in the eastern Mojave Desert along California Highway 62. In here you can see markings from both the California Aqueduct and earlier marks from the WWII-era Desert Training Center.

Google map link

This is an abandoned housing tract east of El Paso. The streets were laid out, but the project went bankrupt before the houses were built.

Google Map link