Jul 19 2012

Encouraging news from spam

Looking at an inbox full of spam is annoying, but if you tilt your head right, you can brighten your day with it’s encouragement!

For example, today I find that “There has been a change to your Experian score”, and if I’m “stressed over bills you can’t pay”, that’s okay because I’m “pre-approved for loan”, so that must be good.  To find that “President reduces amount homeowners owe” is always welcome news.  I can get pills to “burn fat fast”, I can learn to “speak a new language like a pro”, and to top it off, “Subway is giving away sandwiches for a week”!  Given that diet, I’ll probably need to take advantage of the “25k Life policy for $1 per month”.  I still haven’t figured out where to go on vacation but “Southwest Airlines is giving away 2 roundtrip tickets”

All of these spam offers seem to adhere to a single common thread: Yes, the vendor is losing money on the individual transaction, but they make it up in volume! :-p

Jul 6 2012

Spirograph

Something I saw today happened to trigger a memory of the classic Spirograph toy we had as kids.  This was just too cool, and my sister and I had hours of fun with it.  It was very simple, gears and pins and a pen, but it made some really cool drawings.

I poked around online a bit and sure enough – there is a VIRTUAL SPIROGRAPH!

Sure, it’s not quite as fun as spinning the gears with a pen and seeing the image begin to emerge before your eyes, but it’s still pretty cool.

Jun 28 2012

Automatically emptying the Recycling Bin

If you are like me, you don’t use the windows recycling bin for much at all.  Sure, occasionally restoring a file deleted in error, but that’s usually minutes after deleting it and smacking your forehead.  If stuff has been in there for any length of time, I don’t care about it, and it’s annoying that it eats my free disk space.

If you are one of those users who keeps stuff that they CARE about in the recycle bin (as if it is some kind of handy desk-top folder), then you are an idiot, and need to rent a clue.

Windows Mesh is a really need synchronization tool, but I have found that it tends to clutter the recycle bin on both systems which are syncing, so it’s another way for the thing to fill up your disk.

I found a neat article on the web on CybernetNews which shows how to automate this.  The article talks about emptying the bin on startup, but you can also set it for other “triggers” such as locking the screen.

CLICK HERE to view the article, and thanks Ryan for the great and easy to follow tip!

Another handy solution is a cute little product called “bin manager”.  This program adds to the recycle bin right-click menu and allows you to empty out files based on how old they are (delete anything over 2 days for example).  You can also call this from a script to do scheduled purges based on age.

Jun 20 2012

Ivan Oransky: Are we over-medicalized

This is a really interesting talk (well ok, most TED talks are really interesting) about our medical system.  In a nutshell, we’ve built a medical system which gives doctors incentive to perform diagnostics, procedures, and prescribe mediation, whether it’s necessary or not.

Jun 5 2012

Counting unique values in Excel 2010

Let’s say you have a column of values, and you want to know what the unique values are and how MANY of each value there are.  There isn’t a really straightforward way to do this, but you can do it with a couple of easy steps.  Here’s our sample data:

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What we do is to select those cells and make a copy below:

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Now, select those cells and click “remove duplicates” (in the “Data” tool ribbon):

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Just click OK, and you’ll see this:

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So now your spreadsheet looks like this:

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In cell B18, paste this formula: =COUNTIF(A$1:A$15,A18)

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Now, grab the “handle” at the lower right corner of that cell and drag it down to B21.  This copies the formula to the cells below.

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SO, the left hand column now contains the unique values, and the right hand column tells you how many of each you have.

By inserting a pie chart, and picking A18-A21 as the legends, and B18-B21 as the data, you get this:

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Jun 1 2012

Bing goes social – well so much for that!

Microsoft sent out an announcement today about a major “improvement” to Bing’s search engine.  Now, it ties in with social networking.  Microsoft says:

Introducing the new Bing

And just like that…search goes social.
High-quality search results are just the beginning. Now only Bing brings together the best search with people from your social networks, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. Be one of the first of your friends to try it.

And of course:

Some Bing social features are only available in the US at this time and are not compatible with all browsers

Well naturally, nobody would want to use a browser other than IE, now would they? LOL!

So why is this inane, and why am I posting about it?  My feeling is that with this new “improvement”, the search engine (at least for me) will now be pretty worthless.  Why you ask?  Simple – while social networking has it’s uses and so forth, it’s not good for everything.  If I’m searching around for techie stuff, for instance, MY network of “buddies” wouldn’t be any help.  Can you imagine asking your bowling buddy where to find a specific video driver?  In general, haven’t you noticed that there seem to be an awful lot of people in this world who are complete idiots?  Would you ask them… ANYTHING??  No, of course not.  Yet Bing assumes you would, and asks them for you.  How inane!