Reinke Faces Life

>>> Oh well, the favor involves an Excel spreadsheet that I am using to
>>> keep track of the team’s standings. I have a formula in there to
>>> calculate Win-Loss percent as you will see, but what I would also like
>>>each table (AL East, AL West, NL East, NL West) is sort the teams
>>>according to W-L percentage.
>>>
>>> I think what my problem is..is that I am trying to sort ‘within’ the
>>> spreadsheet, ie, just certain cols and rows. If I made each table
>>> (e.g. AL East) a separate spreadhseet then I suppose I could do it.
>>> Well don’t spend too much time on it…(you are too expensive for
>>> me)…I just thought I would give it a try.

>> I copied your sheet 1 to sheet2.
>> I removed your extra columns, merged cells, and two hidden merged cell
>> columns.
>> I “equalized” in column width all cells.
>> I then selected each range to be sorted. Did “data”
>> “sort” “PCT” for the range.
>> I repeated that for each one of the four ranges.
>> I think that is what you were trying to do.
>> It should be possible to code a macro to sort all four ranges
>> automagically.
>> (But you said don’t spend a lot of time.)

>That was great, thanks so much! So it looks like after I make an update,
>that all I have to do is then highlight the range to be sorted, and Select
> Data, Sort. I gave it a test and it worked great.
>
>My next challenge will be to try and write a macro to calculate the GB
> (Games Back)! Thanks again John, I knew you would know how to do that.

http://www.math.utoronto.ca/mathnet/questionCorner/baseball.html

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MATHEMATICS NETWORK
Question Corner and Discussion Area
How To Compute Standings In Baseball
Asked by David Tobey on October 6, 1997:

In sports statistics, namely baseball, how do you calculate the number of games that a second place team is behind the first place team? This is easy if both teams have played the same number of games, but if they have not played the same amount, it isn’t so clear. This sounds like a fascinating mathematical question for a math fan and sports buff. I have come up with a few scenarios, but never have seen a definitive formula.

*** end quote ***

Their Answer:

===

My summary: The original question taught me that sorting in Excel can not handle “hidden columns” (i.e., width set to zero — a consultant’s trick), columns of unequal width, and merged cells. Interesting facts I was unaware of. The effort was time stopped before I learned how to sort four ranges on the same page. I assume a macro, but I’ll bet named ranges might work as well since all sort on the same “pct”. Finally, the heavy lifting of calculating games behind was solved nicely by the University of Toronto. Thanks to the folks there. Finally that was interesting because they don’t play baseball. :-) For all those kids who went to gooferment skool, that formula is (I guess) the Canadian way of writing the generalized solution to a quadratic equation. Also interesting.

An interesting interesting exercise.

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=570307363

Practical RSS
John Mahoney
CTO / co-founder of Instant Information

RSS is nothing more than a specific application of XML applied to the information distribution problem. Here’s an excellent short explanation of it. Everyone may benefit from. RSS could be the way out of the morass of email we all deal with every day. Blogs, many websites, wikis, most forums can all produce an rss feed.

Envision instead of sending an milti-meg email full of attachments, that absorbs resources galore all over, one can create an entry that gets shared automagically with everyone who wants it. RSS is a pull technology. Your reader PULLS the content your interested in as opposed to you having to go get it. You can control it.

It turns the information model upside down from the way we think about it now.

Instead of one email with a bunch of carbon copies, you can “subscribe” to sources. on the intranet and internet, who will feed you.

I’ve been “doing” RSS as both a publisher and a consumer for a while now and would be happy to show you how it can work for you.

If someone can’t live outside of Microsoft LookOut, there is a freeware product called RSSPOPPER that will make an rss feed look like email folder to your LookOut. ;-) Wouldn’t want anyone to go into withdrawal.

If you are on email subscription lists, there are ways to turn them into rss feeds as well.

I’d love to “consult” with anyone who thinks I can help.

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/
2007/03/04/divshare-free-file-hosting-
for-mp3s-and-blog-pictures/

http://tinyurl.com/32h4rj

Divshare – Free file hosting for mp3s and blog pictures
Andy Roberts
an online researcher who initiated distributedresearch.net

***Begin Quote***

Divshare allows you to upload as many files as you like, up to 200Mb per file and then serves them up wherever you like for free, as text links, hotlinked from your blog or embedded as an mp3 player. And there’s a divshare uploader plugin for WordPress.org which makes it so easy to add pictures to a blog without incurring any bandwith or file quota charges, whilst keeping them all organised together under your divshare account, accessible from the dashboard. This would probably have some advantages over using flickr as a file hosting resource for blogs and wiki.

***End Quote***

Naturally, I like anything that is free. This site purports to keep anything online for free forever? I don’t know how they can do it, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying it out.

Of course, being paranoid, I’d only put stuff there that I didn’t really care about. If it was the least bit private, it’d have to be encrypted.

YMMV, but it might be useful.

http://www.plaxo.com

I like Plaxo for it’s ability to sync my Outlook with their most current info.

One thing I do on Sunday nights is “collect” all my new LinkedIn contacts and put them into my Outlook. As part of that process, I check for their plaxo status. If they’re not in Plaxo, I send them an invite. Most times it’s ignored but about a quarter pick it up.

Tonight, Plaxo must be offline tonight. The plaxo invite mechanism did show up with every contact. I focused on the first contact as being the one with the flakeyest invitation mechanism.

Hopefully stuff will be better on the morrow. Sigh, I can break everything.

Dear Word Press Support: I notice you’re closed again. Freeloader Ferd here with a possible suggestion. And need to catch it before I lose it. I notice that there are some invalid ips in the spam. Could that be used to snag them? Also the email address in messages seem to have a pattern and bounce where tried. Is there an email address look up function? Sort of like ping for email? At the very least the domain could be validated. Just thinking, fjohn a free user.

*** begin quote ***
Georgia | j9fvfolrd@freemail.com | IP: 202.171.135.2090
Nice site and fine content
*** end quote ***

DELL really annoyed me. I ordered a disk drive and the kit to make it a usb. And paid for it to be expressed.

DELL took the order together. Didn’t mention anything about a delay.

The next day when my stuff doesn’t arrive. I look into it.

Backorder on the drive?

It’s a standard XPS drive.

And, they just told me that they shipped the kit which is useless without the drive which may ship next Tuesday.

Argh!

When I get everything I am planning to clone the drive and reinstall XP from scratch.

Till then I’ll have to tolerate the XP lockups. Argh!

Argh!

Sigh.

I was thinking last night that the computer user is in a very weak position as opposed to the software makers.

Microsoft imposes all sorts of limitation on what I have bought and really wants me to rebuy what I already have.

There is the whole “installation” nonsense. Why does software have to be “installed”. Good software, by my definition, just runs. Copy it here, it runs. Copy it there, it runs. I like that “portable” movement.

Then, there is the who serial number, or product key, nonsense. So, I may have bout it, have the distribution media, but if I’ve lost the serial number or misplaced it, I’m dead.

Finally, there is the Activation monster. Activation, Windows Genuine Advantage, and such all conspire to make my life miserable. My personal desktop at home, TYNETOP, has been flag several times by these things. It’ sitting with a McAfee induced error in the registry which periodically offends the Microsoft Gods. I’ve had to call a few times to get it to “reactivate”. And don’t believe the barbara striesand about major changes. That pig hasn’t had any new lipstick for a long time.

So, I’m mad and have no way to discharge the madness, except by blogging about it.

http://www.south-brunswick.blogspot.com/

Yesterday, I was trying to post on “the Blog of South Brunswick”. I couldn’t get Google to authenticate me. After too much tinkering, I realized that I had another GMail session open in another Firefox window. Closing that, allowed the signon to proceed and all worked fine. So, if you’re having trouble with Google authentication, look to what you’re signed on to in other windows.

p.s., I got my post in. That’s two.

Arghhh! Maybe I’ll calm down and be able to blog about it.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
2007/02/23/BUGKCO9M0F1.DTL

*** Begin quote ***

Over the past few years, she estimates she’s received hundreds of junk faxes — each one costing her money by using up paper, ink and electricity. Weiss has tried repeatedly to opt out from receiving additional faxes.

*** end quote ***

Might I suggest either of two strategies to help the poor besieged fax receiver?

One, put a PC on the phone line and set it up to receive faxes. While it doesn’t prevent junk faxes (spam faxes might be called spaxes?), it would allow here to save paper and toner. For example, depending upon what software she was using, (I have a copy of WinFaxPro10 that I no longer use. She can have it. I moved to strategy #2), the PC would, give her a set of “files”, one each for transmission, that can be quickly “thumbed thru”. The good can be printed; the bad sent to the electronic bit bucket. Saves the paper and toner. Can dispose of the “trash” rather quickly. I even believe that it has “rules” that you can trigger from the ANI with the fax. (ANI is caller id in techie terms).

Two, she could use a service like eFax. Essentially it does the same thing, but she’d have to subscribe and change her number. (i think inbound is free?) It turns faxes into emails. The ANI is in the message subject line. Depending upon what email package she uses, again rules can send some of the junk to that bit bucket. Again, no wasted toner and paper,

If she was strapped for funds or not “into” computers , I’d use Strategy One. A technically literate friend can put this together rather easily. Even if she doesn’t have a computer, she doesn’t need much to do this. I bet the whole shebang would be under $500. Heck she have have one of my “toxic waste” computers (The one’s that when a relative out grows, they give it to me to “recycle”.) Might cost her more to get it from Jersey than buy something locally. As I said that can be put up on on almost any old one that works. Bet WalMart has something new for under 500$!

As a business person, if she’s computer literate, then I’d use Strategy Two. I think efax, and others of it’s ilk, have very modest fees last time I looked.

Either one might be cheaper and less exasperating for her. She can fax me at my free efax number 781-723-3746 if she wants some commiseration.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/
022607cooltools.html?page=1

http://tinyurl.com/yt5j99

Dragon voice recognition system
Cool Tools By Keith Shaw, Network World, 02/22/07

***Begin Quote***

This version seemed to work only with Windows 2000 and XP; we couldn’t try this on a new Windows Vista system, and it looked like Version 9 wouldn’t be available for Vista.

***End Quote***

I LOST NO TIME TELLING THEM HOW MUCH I THINK THEIR SUPPORT SUCKS!

Just don’t expect any support for your problems from Nuance Software. If you go for it and it happens to work on your windoze box, you’ve won the lottery. I have tried both Dragon and Via Voice, both “supported” by Nuance, and have had mixed results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Just because you get it running, don’t think you’re home free. And, if you have problems, even if you pay their “per incident” support fee, don’t expect to get anything resembling an answer. If you have deduced that I think the “suck”, you’re right.

When discussing bloggers, why don’t people cite an OPML as opposed to a list?

http://tinyurl.com/26mk3j

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/21/nemail21.xml

Recovery programme for email addicts

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:32am GMT 21/02/2007

***Begin Quote***

Alcoholics have a 12-step programme to tackle their addiction, drug addicts too, and now there is one for those addicted to email.

***AND***

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users.

***End Quote***

If email is 10%, then blogging must be 20%.

Like all addictions, you have to wait until the poor soul hits rock bottom. So when I start liking politicians, pop stars, and myself, then take away my keyboard.

FROM THE MLPF GROUP

*** begin quote ***

If we are speaking of the U.S standard of living, then there are some facts that cannot be avoided. Our so-called neighbor Mexico, should list “poverty” as their number 1 export to the United States. The depression of wages by caused by the ability to pay less than market value wages to illegal immigrants is a fact. Our health care system is teetering on collapse because of the ongoing illegal invasion and people who cannot pay their fair share of health costs. Of course, they are not supposed to be here in the first place because they have not taken the legal course to immigrate to our country. Let me also send this little jewel of knowledge out as well. The title is, “An American Suicide”.

*** end quote ***

I don’t want to drag the group into a political discussion. But, the “mexico exporting poverty” comment makes me crazed. The USA’s version of socialism is what causes the problem. Welfare for everyone! Done at the expense of the productive class with absurd taxation (theft by force). Supported by paper money not backed by anything that destroys thrift. And producing sheep people with a “public education system” that would make a German National Socialist and a Communist equally pleased. So, if you think that “importing Mexican poverty” is the problem, then put a giant plastic bag over the Statue of Liberty. After all your relatives got here before you slammed the “golden door” shut behind you. No, my list mates, the problem isn’t that we import “mexican poverty”. The problem is that we have forgotten what this country great. Individuals took responsibility for their choices. It was only when we started thinking that the government could morally do something we couldn’t ourselves. When we learned that we could steal from our fellow citizens via the ballot box. When we fell victim to the siren’s song of a fiat currency unbacked by anything that allowed the government to spend whatever it wanted. That’s when we started down the slippery slope towards socialism. It took 70 years for the Communist USSR to self-destruct. It should be our turn soon. I notice that the writer didn’t discuss that the USA exports inflation to the globe by printing unbacked “Federal Reserve Notes” and sending them overseas for real products. That we “meddle” in everyone’s business. And, that “the great American Experiment” has failed. Guess he didn’t notice: That Habeas Corpus has been suspended by WashingtonDC. That at least half of everyone’s earnings is stolen from them in taxes. (No one can tell the real number because the politicians have done a great job pulling the wool over our eyes.) That we have deficits, unfunded liabilities, and a ton of post dated checks that will eventually come due. And, yet we still blissfully kid ourselves that it is the poor Mexican coming here to make a better life than he can have in Mexico is the source of all our ills. Sorry, but that makes me crazed. fjohn

<Removed by request of the author>

Note: I did reduce the autosave from 5 to 1.

===

Follow up: I didn’t think that there could be any offense taken by sharign what was a very good joke on me. I griped that his software could protect me from my own network losing my post. He correctly pointed out that I could have just saved it BEFORE I pushed “send”. I thought it was funny. He seems to object. He’s a good guy, with a good free product, and I want him to know I thought it would make people laff at me, not him and his product. Maybe it’s an “international thing”. I appologize for my presumption.

The only saving grace is that I don’t have a big readership. Heck even my Mom doesn’t read this stuff. That’s why I had to put it in a book. That, and to torture my friends and relatives with a “white elephant”.     ;-)    With all the polite comments thanking me, when under their breath they probably think I’ve lost my mind?

HTTP://www.gotomypc.com

Have to give them credit for a real security enhancement. And it seems to work well.

I can understand honoring Washington.

I could even understand MLK as America’s Gandhi.

I can’t understand Lincoln.

Never could. Got in trouble all thru school about Lincoln because of that belief. Fellow named Lorenzo wrote a great book about it.

I was accused of being a Southerner at heart. All thought it was funny to watch the good Brother turn red when referring to the “Civil War”, I’d call it “the Second American Revolution”, the “Southern Rebellion against Northern Tyranny”, or the “End of the American Experiment in Liberty”.

;-)

Great fun. I was always polite and respectful. Hence didn’t draw smacks, raps, beatings, or “punish lessons”.

It was even more fun when the topic of the Irish Rebellion, the Green versus the Orange, and England out of Ireland would come up in the current events discussion. Then, the good Brothers, being mostly Irish Catholics, were all too ready to look at it from the loser’s side. The oppressed side, The injured side.

Great fun. To inquire why this was different.

At least, all the state workers weren’t on the road to Trenton this morning.