Up From The Ashes

Isn't It Ironic?

My wife, who is an amazingly smart woman, called me the other day as she was driving to pick up my step-daughter from volleyball practice.  She had the radio on and "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette was playing.  She called me to tell me that she realized that the events in the song aren't actually irony, but they are just plain old misfortune.

Here's the definition of irony.  Looking at some of the lyrics:

"A traffic jam when you're already late
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break"

There's no irony - it's just misfortune.  There's no "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result".  As a matter of fact, there's no relationship at all between the expected and actual results of a traffic jam when you're running late or a no-smoking sign on your cigarrette break.  The same with "rain on your wedding day" or "a free ride when you've already paid".  "A black fly in your chardonnay?"  Nope, sucks your glass of chardonnay got ruined, but not ironic.

About the only ironic thing I can find is the old man who won the lottery and died the next day.  That has some irony, in that you expect to live a different life after winning the lottery but you die.  But at 98, it's not really ironic.  I mean, after all, isn't it sort of expected that at 98 you could pass on at any time?

The only irony about the whole thing is that a song about irony doesn't really talk about ironic things.  The expectation is a song about ironic things and yet the actual outcome is vastly different - it talks about misfortune.  That's irony.

Inserting hyperlinks in Outlook

Outlook has a great feature that I've recently started taking advantage of.  First, the setup.

I have lots of mapped drives - they're mapped to locations I use frequently that others may not have drives mapped to, but I still want to use my mapped drive to put a shortcut in an email.  I used to go to the "standard" mapped drive and get to the document and copy and paste the location into my email.  If there are spaces in that path, the hyperlink would break as soon as there were spaces because Outlook valiantly tried to figure out what to make a hyperlink, saw a network path and made it all a hyperlink.  But it breaks as soon as it encounters spaces.  And what if they user doesn't have the drive that I use mapped?  Outlook offers great "Insert Hyperlink" functionality that solves the problem.

First, decide what text in your email you want to be a hyperlink.  It can be to a web address or a network location.  In the screen shot below, the text is "on the network" because I just put some documents out there for my boss.


Next, you see the "Insert Hyperlink" screen.  The screen has two fields to fill in.  The first is the text that becomes the link.  In this case, "on the network".  The second is the address.  In this example, I used a mapped drive that I personally mapped - no one else in my organization has and "S:\" drive, but I do. 


This sounds great, but what happens when the recipient gets the email?  Since they don't have an "S:\" drive, will they get an error?  No.  See the screens shot below - Outlook translated the path into it's UNC path, so anyone who doesn't have an S:\ drive mapped will still get to the folder I specified.


I've found this very useful.  Hopefully my recipients find it useful, too.