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Erin blowing out her candles on her birthday cake on her birthday the other day. My little girl is growing up fast. She is 7 now and a little livewire bundle. When you hold her she clings like a monkey, and you can feel every muscle and tendon is just wiry – she is bursting with energy and hardly ever sits still.

She loves to jump up to me to get a cuddle and she springs off the floor and into my arms and wraps her arms around my neck. Usually this is followed by her wriggling back down (all too soon) and she is off and running at the next thing. She has endless stamina, I think she will be a good long distance runner. Erin also loves to draw. She often comes in and borrows my whiteboard markers – making a little box on the whiteboard to draw pictures for daddy.

I love her!

I had an interesting question about conditional formatting posed in the comments by Stephen.

In a new sheet, I am trying to make a whole row turn red, green or amber depending on the value of one cell in that row, so I can easily see which jobs we have won, lost or are pending. Any 'IF' conditional formula I write gets thrown out by Excel. What am I doing wrong?

I promised him an answer so here it is.

For this exercise I am making some assumptions.

• You are using Excel 2007 format Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx or .xlsm). These instructions will not work in detail for Excel 2003, though the concept is similar.
• That there are 3 conditions we  are looking for. Of course Excel 2007 allows more than 3 conditions so you can add more if you need. (One of the improvements on Excel 2003 that only allowed 3 rules)
• That the entire row is needed to be coloured. If you need a smaller section than change the formulas accordingly.
• That the entire worksheet needs this formatting. If you need a smaller section than change the formulas accordingly.
• That the conditional formats are going to be based on a cell that returns a specific result based on some other rule.

Well it was stupid really. I have had enough experience with emergency departments now that I should have listened to my inner voice of reason and not bothered going.

Anyway – I didn’t. Late Saturday night my Uvula decided to get inflamed and swollen. I was a little worried when I tried sleeping that I couldn’t breath and was choking on it. After some will I? wont I? games I rang my doctor father in New Zealand (waking him at 4:45am his time) to ask his advice. He suggested going to the hospital. I don’t think my father has ever waited in a public hospital emergency waiting room. He is always on the other side of the wall. Anyway forgetting this fact I then ran the local hospital 24 hour nursing line. They advised the same thing. So now all I had to do was decided if I could drive without choking, passing out and crashing thus killing myself in the process. After some more will I? won’t I? I decided against calling an ambulance and drove myself the 20 minutes to the hospital. I parked and went in at 3am. After being seeing in about 10 minutes by a nurse who oohed and aahed and said “my yes it is swollen we will have to get a doctor to see you” I sat and waited. Fortunately I took my walkman and 2 books. I had finished the first book, and was starting on the second at 7AM. at 7:25 I was seen by a doctor who took all of 5 minutes to examine me and tell me to go home and take 2 over the counter anti inflammatory pain meds. Bah Humbug!

I went home took the meds and went to sleep.

I am recording here for evermore my intention never to go the hospital again unless an ambulance takes me! My advice for anybody is that if you can walk or drive chances are you don’t actually need to go to the hospital. Wait and it will be all ok. If not the ambulance will get you anyway.

And if I had done some Googling before I went I would have found this fantastic advice at http://swollenuvula.blogspot.com/ and these yummy pictures.

Joel Spolsky, one of the worlds leading authorities on software development, has launched a new questions and answer website called StackOverflow.

Here is his rationale behind the decision to do so.

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.