Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I don’t know why I seem to write massive link posts lately – maybe because i have been very busy with my three major priorities, family, work and photography. However this is a priority as well, so I need to allocate some time to write soon. In the mean time I am going to clear my browser of the tabs that are open there.

Here goes – and have a great weekend. Oh – and this photo was my favourite of the week. I took it in low light, no flash using the 70-200 2.8 IS L Lens.

Exposure 1/128, Aperture f2.8, focal length 170mm, ISO 2000

Photography Links

• A Beginner’s Guide to Flickr by Elizabeth Halford – I love flickr also – an awesome tool
• Helping Your Client Prepare for Their Shoot – Dress to Match the Sofa? by Elizabeth Halford
• 5 Tips for Photographing Children – some great tips here
• 3 Affordable E-books to Improve Your Photography by Darren Rowse – thinking of getting these
• How to Capture Motion Blur in Photography by Darren Rowse - learning this technique is going to be fun
• Jasmine Star – an awesome wedding photography blog
• I love this photo gypsy meets gangster
• Jakob Aungiers – this is an amazing portfolio

So I was all excited. Office DevCon 2009 was in Brisbane this year. We develop in Excel and VBA. I was looking forward to networking with others who do the same, and learning some new techniques and tricks.  The session track précis hinted at new reporting techniques, building reports for excel-centric clients, new VBA forms and more. I skipped the first day because there was only 1 session I wanted to go to. I was all excited about the second day because I thought (wrongly) my desires would be met. But no. I should have read the presenter profiles page first!.

These guys were all Access gurus. And they seemed to know what they were doing, but when it came to Excel they ignored the massive functionality of Excel, and treated it primarily as a report display system.

I think I am going to offer to present next year.

I came across an interesting issue yesterday. I found a limit that I was previously unaware of in Excel 2003.

I had written some code that was taking data from a large data set into an array, filtering for some specific information and writing the results to another array. Then I was attempting to paste that array data into a range in the spreadsheet as a report. All was working well until I selected one specific set of inputs and ran the report. Suddenly it stopped pasting halfway though the paste. That is it would paste some of the data and not the rest and the code would break on the paste function. After some analysis I determined that the particular cell it kept breaking on had 1400 characters in it. Some research on Google helped. I discovered two things.

The following is the sample email that pops up in Windows Mail. Windows mail is being gradually replaced by Windows Live mail. This is a much better free email application than the old Outlook Express which technically wasn't free, you had to buy windows XP to get it. Windows live mail can be downloaded for free as part of the live suite.

I use it for a lot of clients as an easy way to manage their Hotmail or Gmail accounts on their PC.

Windows Mail is the successor to Outlook Express

Windows Mail builds on the foundation of Outlook Express, adding a variety of new features designed to make your e-mail experience more productive and fun, while helping to reduce risks and annoyances such as phishing and junk e-mail.