Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Vcard to CSV conversion for Mac users

Vcard to CSV conversion instructions (for importing Apple Address Book contacts into Gmail):

[If you are simply trying to export AOL's addresses to a mail program like Gmail (or to Apple's Address Book), I suggest using Plaxo.com. Although you have to open an account, it's free and this is the easiest method by far.]

You can try using an online converter, such as this, but I don't know whether it's secure. I myself prefer not to use an online converter.

Before reading my instructions, you may also want to try some of the existing mini apps for doing this. I tried one and found it unsatisfactory because I couldn't choose what to export to csv. Because I wanted Gmail to keep phone and address information in addition to email addresses (for remote access when I travel), I think my own instructions below are more useful.

For an on-board technique, try the following. Use Andreas Amann's AppleScript Address Book Scripts to export contact data from Address Book. This may take some time, depending on how many contacts you have in Address Book. Be sure to tab delimit and to set the script to include a header row. Open the output file -- contacts.txt -- as a spreadsheet in Excel. If you keep a list of home and work (and other) email addresses of your contacts in Address Book, there are now at least two email columns (Work and Home) in the Excel file. To preserve all the data (because Gmail's contacts importer only recognizes one email column), copy and paste the Home email column to a new column and name it "Home Email"; then cut and paste the Work email column into the original Home email column using the command Paste Special:Skip Blanks. Name the header on this column "Email" and make sure it comes right after the First Name and Last Name columns. This will allow Gmail to recognize the main email column ("Email") but to save the secondary one ("Home Email"). Get rid of any misinterpreted data: e.g., in my case, bad phone numbers by globally replacing “=1” with [nothing] where the script incorrectly interpreted the country code +1 in Address Book phone numbers. Save the edited Excel file as a .csv file. Open Gmail and select contacts:import in order to move your contacts into Gmail.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

More AIPAC Mischief?

Reviving suspicions that AIPAC exercises undue influence on US policy, a new report by Time magazine claims that the FBI is investigating a possible political deal between the pro-Israel lobbying organization and Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Whatever the truth of the allegations, new polls by Zogby International reveal that nearly half of Americans surveyed believe that the Lobby was improperly involved in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. With American sentiment increasingly turning against the war as a money pit and a quagmire in the making, how will voters view the Lobby's tendency to conflate Israeli and American interests in the Middle East? And just as troublingly, how clearly will Americans be able to distinguish the Lobby and its motives from the interests of American Jews at large, especially when AIPAC and its Jewish organizational allies so often claim -- falsely, but seductively -- that they represent the views of the American Jewish community (as if that community were, despite all evidence to the contrary, a monolithic entity)?