June 2003

Numbers kind of day

It's been a numbers kind of morning. Last evening though I took a stroll down memory lane. Working in the garage yesterday I found several old notebooks I'd been casually looking for. Seventeen years ago today I was on the way to see my orthodontist. Was scribbling jokes down in a note book... apparently those heard on the radio? It's interesting to see what I was writing back then. In one entry I have the soliloquy from Hamlet... "To be or not to be..." the minds of 13-year olds!

No guts, no glory

John Monahan: no guts, no glory. Mr. Monahan was a journalism professor at Colorado State University. Today he heads Better Health Magazine as it's editor. He was an instructor, with a great public relations background, who inspired a great deal of creative thinking and encouraging students to think in creative ways.

Other folks from the CSU days are on to new journeys as well. Marty Tharp is now councilwoman for Fort Collins. Marty Traynor, now Marty Traynor Spencer, is editor of Natural Foods Merchandizer in Boulder, Colo.

Excel how-to

This is an entry more for my record keeping than any other reason. The question is how to best create summary tables in Excel. The data I have has a row for each customer and sets of columns for each month. Each customer row had data in only one set of columns. Subtotal gives an easy way to consolidate this data onto a single line. The problem comes in that if you copy the excel data with the sub-rows hidden they show up in the pasted data

The solution: This only happens if you paste into Excel. Paste into a text editor, select all and paste back into Excel and voila. All is good.

Consequences of Microsoft's Change and other nits

According to the project manager for Internet Explorer Microsoft will stop releasing IE outside of the operating system. This will apparently mean that users will have to upgrade their OS to get a new version of IE (and the impacts on Macintosh users is unclear). However it seems this same decision may also be a boon to other browser developers. Certainly Micro$oft will work to ensure their browser integrates tightly with the operating system. But shops who are slower to upgrade (my company for one is plenty happy with Windows 2000 and XP is not on the roadmap). Will this enable other browsers such as Opera to gain ground as they can be updated between OS updates?

Also as a frequent user of both Mac and Windows keyboards I want a way to easily switch the position of keys. The Control key is in the same position on both keyboards but it's function is different. As my main uses of Windows are light I'd rather have it where the ALT key is so that copy and paste work "properly" in my book.

What is a Blog?

The Harvard Law Blogging site has the beginings of an essay attempting to define what weblogs are. I'm not sure I agree with all of the "technical" aspects of what is required to be a weblog. However it's an interesting start at quantifying what blogs are.

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