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Oh Noes! The dreaded #REF error!
In the world of conversation killers, talking about Excel to the average person ranks up there with the best. At the same time, there is always a chance that you wish you could have that conversation at work when it gets down to the wire. Even as a pro, you might need that brush up on
Array Functions,
calculation tricks,
VBA examples or some examples from one of the
well known authors on Excel. There is also no shortage of people who dedicate their working lives to this arcane program and are more than willing to assist others for free by posting solved issues on their websites. People like
David McRitchie,
OzGrid,
Rob Bovey,
Ron de Bruin,
John Walkenbach,
Dick Kusleika,
Joseph Rubin and
Chip Pearson.
Or if you just want to be a Debbie Downer at the next party, just take page from any of the following, memorize it. and recite it when faced with that nudge you don't want to talk to: Excel Support, Jon Peltier, Colo's Junk Room, Scriptorium, Andrew's Excel Tips, Andy Pope, Anthony's VBA Page, Rodney Powell, Array Formulas, Erlandsen Data Consulting, Excel-it, ExcelUser, JKP's Excel Page, John Lacher, McGimpsey, Bill Jelen, Stephen Bullen, Tushar Mehta, VBusers.com, The Excel Nexus, The Excel Logic Page, and Anthoney Does Excel. It’s a fast and easy way to ward off lounge lizards.
Or if you just want to be a Debbie Downer at the next party, just take page from any of the following, memorize it. and recite it when faced with that nudge you don't want to talk to: Excel Support, Jon Peltier, Colo's Junk Room, Scriptorium, Andrew's Excel Tips, Andy Pope, Anthony's VBA Page, Rodney Powell, Array Formulas, Erlandsen Data Consulting, Excel-it, ExcelUser, JKP's Excel Page, John Lacher, McGimpsey, Bill Jelen, Stephen Bullen, Tushar Mehta, VBusers.com, The Excel Nexus, The Excel Logic Page, and Anthoney Does Excel. It’s a fast and easy way to ward off lounge lizards.
Roger Ebert on Anime, with a focus on Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
"In Japan, animation is not seen as the exclusive realm of children's and family films, but is often used for adult, science fiction and action stories, where it allows a kind of freedom impossible in real life. Some Hollywood films strain so desperately against the constraints of the possible that you wish they'd just caved in and gone with animation." -- Roger Ebert on anime, with this excerpt being related to Tokyo Godfathers. Ebert has been a fan of anime for a while, especially the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Ebert has reviewed 6 of the 18 Studio Ghibli films released to date, and even interviewed Miyazaki with a bit of fanboy glee. More reviews and videos inside. [more inside]
Enough
America's gun problem is completely unique: Why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life. [more inside]
How the Daddy of Jesse Helms Gave Birth to Black Power
In 1936 in the Jim Crow South, Robert F. Williams was an 11-year-old black boy in Monroe, North Carolina, who watched helplessly as Jesse Helms Sr. (father and namesake of the former senator) beat an African-American woman to the ground and "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey." Years later, after a stint in the segregated military, Williams returned home to Monroe and worked as an NAACP organizer, where he brought international attention to the Kissing Case, a 1958 incident in which two black boys under the age of 10 were sentenced to a reformatory for kissing a white girl. By then, Williams had also attracted controversy for his advocacy of armed self-defense, a position he outlined in the book Negroes with Guns. But it would all change overnight in 1961, when Williams landed on FBI's Most Wanted list, after being charged with kidnapping a white couple that Williams claimed he was trying to save from an angry black crowd. [more inside]
The rain in Spain smells mainly of dimethyl-9-decalol
The smell of earth after rain
is called Petrichor, and it is caused by Geosmin, a sesquiterpenoid metabolite with the chemical formula C12H22O. Human sensitivity to geosmin is about 10 parts per trillion. (via)
"The desert snail at once awoke and found himself famous"
In the mid-1800s, a snail spent years glued to a specimen card in the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum) before scientists realized it was still alive. What became of this snail? Ask Metafilter found out! [more inside]
We're just taking baby steps in the right direction.
You Feel Like Shit: An Interactive Self-Care Guide "This is meant to be an interactive flow chart for people who struggle with self care, executive dysfunction, and/or who have trouble reading internal signals. It's designed to take as much of the weight off of you as possible, so each decision is very easy and doesn't require much judgment."
Cities of ladies
In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey. "But the women couldn't stop writing."
- How to Design a City for Women [more inside]
The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang
Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more. [more inside]
The ability to recreate an entire movie is insignificant next to the potential of the Force.
Back in 09', Star Wars Uncut (previously) asked people to recreate 15 second chunks of Star Wars: A New Hope however they wanted, using live action, animation, text adventure screens, SCUMM interfaces, costumed pets, and more. Now they've been edited together to recreate the entire movie as a homemade, constantly shifting media experiment. (Vimeo link)
What's That?
What's That? Sadly, the education of the youth of amerika is declining in more than one way. The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello mushroom. And no, she wasn't new...and to make matters worse the checker next to her didn't know either. (more inside)
Underrated Movies
Oniongate
Undoubtedly, at some point in your life, a recipe has told you to brown or caramelize some onions for 5-10 minutes. As many frustrated cooks have found through experience, this step of the recipe is a damned lie. In fact, the now-ubiquitous suggestion of 5-10 minutes isn't even a remote approximation of the amount of time it takes to brown an onion; Alton Brown and Julia Child weigh in on the matter, suggesting that the task can take anywhere from 45 minute to an hour. [more inside]
One sandwich to rule them all
Hello. Building on the domestication of fire, stable agriculture, invention of cheese and the slicing of bread, the greatest innovation of humanity is without question the cheese sandwich. These can be uncooked, or open, or toasted or grilled. Offering popular versions and other variations, sandwiches can also be tiny, substantive, or earrings or Christmas tree decorations. Other ingredients could include balsamic blueberry, fried egg, apple, olives, mac and ham, spinach, bacon and avocado, pickle, haggis, cucumber, clementines or smoked reindeer. Or twenty slices of American cheese. Makers can be competitive or award winning, speak in Welsh, or serve you from a truck; just respect the dish and its history, even if you were expecting something else. [more inside]
DeathSucks.pdf (also known as SayingGoodbye.pdf)
A free "workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies", available as a "version with lots of swearing at the useless, shitty situation you're in" or a "version with a fair amount of black humor but no cursewords". Including "Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone," "Depressing Mad Libs" (obituary templates), "So You Suddenly Have To Become Some Kind of Hacker," and "How to plan a non-religious death party". Published 2019.
Drew Caricature
Can't get enough Whose Line is it Anyway? 71 Scenes From a Hat, 16 Party Quirks, 52 Props, 5 Film Dubs, 84 Hoedowns, 37 Sound Effects, 45 Questions Only, 11 Hats/Dating Service Videos, 52 World's Worst, 13 News Flashes, 35 Let's Make a Date, 9 Press Conferences, 60 Superheroes, 6 Foreign Film Dubs, 29 Irish Drinking Songs, 4 Animals, 9 If You Know What I Mean, 2 Backwards Scene, 54 Greatest Hits, 58 Song Styles, 2 All in One Voice, 21 Scenes to Rap, 3 90-Second Alphabets, 11 Questionable Impressions, 4 Two-Line Vocabulary, 3 Number of Words, 17 Weird Newscasters and (probably the most telling of how much they had to hold back due to censorship standards) 6 Blooper Reels. Prefer the UK version? Every episode of Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Procrastination and Useful Websites
Barack Obama is the next President of the United States
Brief Overview of our Reptilian Overlords
Barack Obama has had an alien lizard implanted in the back of his head, with your tax dollars. You might think this sounds like some big pile of conspiracy tinfoil hat crap. Please read on and consider all the evidence before you jump to conclusions. [more inside]
Typical Pentagon boondoggle
The Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute in sunny Monterey, CA, offers over six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates. [more inside]