I missed the one year anniversary of my citizenship ceremony. I still haven't applied for a passport. I wonder if the guy from Ivory Coast (Ivory Coastian?) is an accountant yet. I hope so.

Tip: bc(1) (bundled in most Unix-like systems, including OS X) is handy for converting between bases.

ringo:~ tim$ bc
bc 1.05
Copyright 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'. 
ibase=10
obase=16
255
FF
1024
400
1239087123
49DAF813

Holy crap, Microsoft is annoying. Just when I thought I'd outgrown the whole "Micro$soft sucks" phase, they find another way to piss me off. Outlook and Exchange Server add stupid attachments that no other email program can read. I don't care so much about the formatting information, but it turns out that if Outlook users attach a real file to their email, it sometimes winds up in the winmail.dat file too. Of course, so many people use crappy old Outlook that they don't think it's their problem if your email program that does things properly doesn't read their god-damned obfuscated files.

If you can't convince the sender to use a non-braindead mailer, try this.