Reminders

Years ago, while I was briefly affiliated with the Space Forum on Compuserve, I created a database of significant events in Space History. 

I dug out that data file and modified it for display on the Splash Screen when EM first starts. 

If you get tired of this screen just uncheck the "Show Splash on Startup" option at the bottom of the screen and it will not automatically be displayed. You can always view the splash, and reminders by opening it from the main screen Help Menu choice.

If you want to examine the display in detail and believe the screen will disappear (normal for the splash screen) before you've finished, click on the picture or text and the splash screen will remain on screen. Click the picture a second time to get rid of it. 

If the splash disappears before you've finished reading the reminders, go to the Help menu and select view splash screen. It will remain onscreen until you click on the picture to close it.

The program defaults to the file "Space History.csv" in the home folder of EM.

Space History.csv contains significant events from 1956 to 1989. If you want to be reminded of events occurring since then, you'll have to add them yourself. 

I don't wish to go out and buy another copy of Janes' to update this database. But, I'd welcome any properly formatted comma delimited text on events NOT contained within this file. If they are appropriate, I'll add them to the file. Appropriate is highly subjective, but inclusions to this database should be of general interest. I don't wish to add every launch just Deep Space Stuff, Manned stuff, Big Observatories HST, Chandra and similar. Don't send me data of interest only to a smaller group. Don't send me separate files, just copy your new entries into an email message and I'll copy them out to the data file. 

You can copy, move or rename this file however you wish. Once you have changed the file's name or location, go to the setup screen, select "Data Files" and use the browse button to point to the new name/location of the file and save your configuration. 

I'd strongly recommend you rename the file if you add any new data as I'll be distributing "Space History.csv" in future downloads and you don't want any hard work you've undertaken modifying the file to be erased by an install of a copy from the new download.

You can and probably should modify this file to suit your personal needs/desires. It is in the standard comma delimited format acceptable to most spreadsheet and database programs. Here's a snip of the file. 

There are some processing rules. The text file must be comma delimited. 

The first field must contain either the month of the event or an asterisk (*).  Specifying an asterisk will cause the program to display events for that day of the month for every month.

The second field must be the day of the month of the event or a repeating day. A repeating day is either every particular day of the week like:

*,saturday,1966,,Got the day of week/month working

Where, instead of a date of the month you just enter a day. Every Saturday this message will display. If you substitute a month for the asterisk then every Saturday for that month will display the message.

Another popular usage is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th particular day of the month in the case below:

*,saturday1,1966,,Got the day of week/month working

The numeral following the day, in this case, will force EM to display this message on the first Saturday of every month. Saturday2 would display on the second Saturday, Saturday3 on the third and so on.

Again, replace the asterisk with a month number and only the (in the case above) 1st Saturday of that month will display.

You MUST spell out the entire day, not use an abbreviation for that day. You could insert a space between the day and the number but it is unnecessary. Case is irrelevant.

When displaying these repeating memo fields, the YEAR is omitted.

The third field must be the year of the event in 4 digit form if you want nicely lined up columns or be empty. Empty year fields will cause the memo to be displayed without a Year associated with them. Good for repeating events.

The fourth field is used to indicate how many days in advance of an event you wish the event to start displaying on the reminder screen. NONE of the above entries has an advance warning in this field so each reminder will display ONLY on the day it occurs. However, suppose it's your wife's birthday on July 15, 1950. You could create this reminder

7,15,1950,7,"Forget and die, it's your wife's birthday."

Starting on the 8th of July, this reminder will start popping up. 

To indicate it is for a time in the future, the program appends text to so inform you. For instance, on the 8th the program would display:

1950 Forget and die, it's your wife's birthday - in 7 days, Saturday 07/15/00

Where 7 days will decrease each day until the day prior, in which case the program says tomorrow and the actual date of the event is indicated by the day of the week and date following that.

The fifth field is the memo field. 

The text field that contains the memo specifying the significance of the date is where you have to be careful. This field MUST NOT begin with a number (Exception noted below). The field also should contain NO quotation marks except at the beginning and end of the field. You only NEED to put quotation marks around this field if it contains a comma as displayed on line 1 of the above data snip.

The exception here is that you can start the memo field with a numeral but you will probably have to manually edit the output from a spread sheet program. Excel does not put quotation marks around fields that start with a numeral but contain text. The visual basic import routines see numbers as separate fields and so get confused when they see a string of text preceeded by a number. However, if you MUST have a numeral start the memo field you can put quotation marks around the field and VB will not become confused and properly import the memo. So, for instance:

3,14,1999,,1st memo

will cause the program to fail reading data where:

3,14,1999,,"1st memo"

will import just fine.

You could fool Excel, and other spread sheets into properly delimiting the text with quotation marks by including an unnecessary comma for instance if in a spread sheet you enter the line

1st memo,

with that trailing comma, the spread sheet will enclose the entire field in quotes. Just be aware of this when you create data file entries.

If there is a formatting problem in your data file, the program will skip the load, and display "Formatting Error Detected in  (the name of the file)" in the text window. If the file isn't found, that will be displayed.

I split the date into separate fields so that you can sort this file in a spread sheet on multiple columns. In this instance, the file is sorted in ascending order by month, day and year. This would be no problem for any spread sheet. But, suppose you want the program to display the events in reverse yearly order but with the dates of the month ascending. Then, sort the file first by ascending month, second by ascending day and third by descending year. EM will post its search results in the order in which matches for today's date appear in the file.

You need not sort the file at all. Regardless of how mixed up the file gets, EM will always pick out events that occur on the month and day to which your system clock is currently set. And, any events that have advance warning times that place them in the window of time beginning on the system's date will also display.