IPOD
RADIO
So. This interweb thingie. Kinda cool, isn't it? I've heard it said you could be a dog on here, and no one would know the difference. Well, the typing might be a little less graceful, what with the paws versus fingers deal, but you get the point, I trust.
It's really like a second life (pun not intended)- it's a world of thoughts, and ideas, and concepts. Even the silliest aspects of this world have a gem somewhere at their core. Now that gem may be a perfect emerald, or it may be a black market black diamond carelessly irradiated by the Russian mafia and still quite radioactive as you try it on your finger in blissful ignorance- but again- there's a point for meditation in each aspect of this ocean of information we swim in.
It's a big sea in some ways, and small in others. It's fast to traverse, but nearly infinite in expanse. There's always more room, more water in which to swim. There's always more to see and the tides can pull in so many directions you wind up swimming in circles. Then too, sometimes you jet out over a vast expanse of this ocean you've never seen, and it's new and beautiful. Or you come home to a favorite place, and it's old and beautiful.
That's freedom, pretty much as pure as we are going to get it, in this life, anyway.
So... what does it say about you if your idea of fun in all this freedom... is to be mean? Heh. Look around the real world. Aren't there sharks in abundance? Is that what you enjoy being?
The reason I like the internet- here and elsewhere- so much, is that for once, it is a place where thoughts can help. It's not that there's never the temptation to be a shark, but it's just as easy to be an Eschrichtius robustus {*}, and that's why I will keep swimming in this sea. ..
Questions, to this point:
I have no answer for last time until asked. 
This time, I will ask:
What's the handiest trick you know that you can summarize in a few words to a few paragraphs?
[Yeah, I'm looking to steal mad new skillz and I'm lazy at the moment... well, except for studying. *sigh* better get back to it. now.]
{*} Gray Whale. 
JUN 15, 2008 12:39 PM
I liken myself more to a dolphin. I'm kind of gracefull, definitely playfull, I have a 6 sense which hardly ever lets me down, I like helping others, I'm curious...but I'm not always as harmless as I look.
Hmmm my question to you would be....why are you actually asking us all these questions in the first place? Are you just curious by nature or do you have any other reasons....I mean is all this leading to something....
I'm afraid I don't have any tricks, except doing backward flips through hoops and balancing balls on my nose. Sorry.
JUN 15, 2008 11:12 PM
A trick I use often in Excel is two formulas that will give me, from a list of many Items within many Categories, the number of items within each Category and their Sales Rank within that Category. The built-in rank function in Excel cannot differentiate if there are multiple things to be ranked within a dataset. It is great for ranking within the entire dataset, but if you need to rank within each Category amongst a list that includes 100 Categories, you'd have to change the dataset range in the rank formula for each Category. Terribly time consuming. When I am doing this, there can be 30,000+ rows of data just for one of our divisions. So, I pull a list of items with sales from our data warehouse, plop it into an Excel spreadsheet, and sort ascending by Department, then ascending by Category, and then descending by Sales (usually weekly cases sold). It looks a little like columns A through E here:
A through G are the column labels and 1 through 11 are the row labels. Row 1 contains column headers. In the Item Count column (F2), I use "=if(D2=D3,F3,G2)" and copy that down the entire column of cells, with each number advancing by one. F3 would have the formula "=if(D3=D4,F4,G3)" and so on. In the Item Rank column (G2), I use "=if(D2=D1,G1+1,1)" and copy it down all cells in that column. G3 would be "=if(D3=D2,G2+1,1)" and so on. The Item Count column does not work until the Item Rank column is populated. The nice thing is that it doesn't matter how many Categories or Items there are - it works regardless (unless I exceed the 65,000 row maximum in Excel - then I usually break each division into a separate spreadsheet). My department is usually only looking at the Categories in which we have products, so by filtering to that, it's less than 55,000 rows.
No, seriously, that's the best trick I know.
