December 2010

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jethro's picture

Tech Talk Christmas Summary

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

ExcelMicrosoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

OutlookMicrosoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.

jethro's picture

Excel function of the week - AND

The AND function takes each of the conditions inside the brackets and evaluates for their truth, and then multiplies the results together. TRUE = 1 and FALSE = 0. So if any condition is FALSE then the overall statement returns FALSE.

The formula for AND needs to be placed in brackets with each of the conditions separated by a comma. For example =AND(H1<1,G1>1)

In this instance the function will evaluate H1 to see if the value is less than 1. if it is then it will return TRUE or 1 and if not FALSE or 0. Then it will do the same for G1.
The two values are multiplied together and the answer is then either 1 or 0, TRUE or FALSE.

The Excel Help says:

One common use for the AND function is to expand the usefulness of other functions that perform logical tests. For example, the IF function performs a logical test and then returns one value if the test evaluates to TRUE and another value if the test evaluates to FALSE. By using the AND function as the logical_test argument of the IF function, you can test many different conditions instead of just one.

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jethro's picture

The Project Managers Birthday Party

It was meant to be a secret, but like all office secrets people knew something was happening. Little clusters of people standing around a desk looking at a screen broke up and walked back to their own desks when someone came near, whispered conversations in the photocopy room and the inevitable smoke break with one of the non smokers saying "I'll come out for some fresh air".

Finally the news was broken. There was a major project being planned. It was going to involve a select bunch of people who were part of the project team and privy to the specific details, but the overall project was at least no longer a secret. An interoffice email went out from the internal communications manager and overnight a bunch of project flyers were put up on walls and doors.

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High Calling Photo Play Get Out in Black and White

The high calling photo play titled Get Out In Black and White challenged us to look at things differently.

As I was in the city taking a photo of a statue for someone on Flickr in Dublin who needed a photo from Brisbane, I decided to plop down on the corner of a busy intersection and just shoot in the two directions that were immediately 90 degrees in front of me. I then cut down to the top 27 pictures of people - just average every day people going about their business, mostly unaware of me taking photos (the advantage of a 70-200 zoom lens.

Claire challenged us to do the following:

      • Find a place where there is a lot of activity.
      • Fade into the scene by finding a comfortable place to sit or stand.
      • Identify an object or person you would like to capture.
      • Capture your subject in relation to the whole setting.
      • Covert to black and white or use the black and white function on your camera. Email me if you do not know how to do this.
      • Blog about the experience and tell us how it stretched you. Also tell us about the boredom you feel, or don’t feel, when it comes to taking pictures. If you want to just give a description to an image on Flickr, that is also acceptable.

How did this stretch me? It forced me to evaluate the actual surroundings. usually i just shoot people - because people interest me. today I was challenged to consider the context. I tried to get the same spot for most of the shots, showing the slight uphill climb, the busy corner, the wait for the crossing lights, and to capture the people in that space. I used a very shallow depth of field deliberately as I still wanted the people to be the primary focus point, but there's enough detail in the multitude of images to display the life of the corner as people pass through it.

2010-12-11 Brisbane City 2 corners 002-bw-bw-2002010-12-11 Brisbane City 2 corners 003-bw-bw-2002010-12-11 Brisbane City 2 corners 006-bw-bw-200

jethro's picture

Still here

a simple uncomplicated post, a stream of consciousness, im still here

2010-11-24 Cooking Class 026photos, children, pool filters and Christmas shopping, work, clients and responsibilities, deadlines and staff, immediacy and urgency, little time for rest, sleeping on the lounge floor where my wife couldn't wake me even after standing on me, riding with my mates - the wind and energy and creation and freedom of being out on the bike, the effort of keeping up when they go fast, the rush of speed, the burn of lactic acid, the taste of vanilla coke and a nice latte, the kiss of a 6 year old at night time, the laughing of happy children filling my ears, the fragrance of incense, the sudden splash in the fish tank as one fish attacks another

the interruptions, stress levels rising, the feeling of panic as to do lists spiral upwards

doing things for other people that makes them happy, the rush of seeing someone's world interrupted with joy because of your thoughtfulness or the words you spoke, the thanks you receive

food, necessary yet a pleasure, those who prepare it for you thoughtfully and carefully with love and tenderness

simple things

im still here