Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Geek (second class)
The format of the file (.tar) which I acquired on 14th November turns out to be some ancient magnetic tape archiving format which I am not at all confident of unpicking. So I thought I had better try for second class membership of the geek club.
Started off with Excel pivot tables - something of which I have been vaguely aware for some time but which I had never used in anger, having been put off by the user interface. Either it has got better or I have got more time because I actually suceeded in producing a table this time. User interface still quite tricky but looks to be powerfull if you invest enough time in it - the only catch in my case being that the data has to be passed through a formatting program before it can be given to the pivot tabler - not yet having found out how to get this last to classify one's data. That is to say it is fine if you have things like 'North', 'West', 'South' and 'East' in text in your data but not if your directions are in degrees from 0 through to 360 and you need something to convert direction in degrees to a cardinal point. I awarded myself a pass on this one.
Next moved on to the Excel find and replace command. This refused to find four instances of the string " tone=" out of the twenty or so that were present on the worksheet in question. Which was odd because I was able to find them using Visual Basic code. The only excuse that Excel could have had was that the cells in question were quite large with maybe 20,000 charectars each. I couldn't see anything odd about the context of the tones which Excel couldn't find, so just corrected them by hand. The failure to find will remain a mystery. Fail.
The third test was escaping from a printer crash which locked up the PC. Control+Alt+Delete was not doing anything, the cursor was not moving and so I resorted to power down. Count to 20 and power up. PC boots up OK. Go into Explorer and the PC freezes again. Power off and on again. Try again and the same thing happens. Power off and on again. This time close the PC down again as soon as it has booted up so that Windows gets a clean close down. I thought I had done the trick. Go into Explorer and try to open the Word file which I had been trying to print at the time of the original crash. PC locked up again. Go through the whole performance again, but this time when I surface again, simply delete the Word file rather than trying to get into it. And then, after about an hour and a half of this, I am back up and running again. Or rather recreating the Word file that had been lost. Who would be in PC support? Pass.
So I think that with a little bit more effort I will be able to award myself the order of the geek (second class).
In the meantime, mildy annoyed by the Post Office. Turning over stamps in preparation for the Christmas frenzy, we find we have a whole lot of elderly first class stamps. It seems that although we bought the first class stamps in good faith, thinking we had a contract with the Post Office for the transmission of a first class letter, the Post Office has reneged on the deal. The old first class stamps have to be augmented with a few extra pennies for them to be valid. A very dubious practise on their part. The whole point of buying a stamp which says first class rather than 43p or whatever is that one is insuring against the vaguaries of Post Office pricing.
Second wet ride running to Cheam. One of those days when it is wet, but not wet enough to be worth putting the cape on. So one gets home rather damp.
Started off with Excel pivot tables - something of which I have been vaguely aware for some time but which I had never used in anger, having been put off by the user interface. Either it has got better or I have got more time because I actually suceeded in producing a table this time. User interface still quite tricky but looks to be powerfull if you invest enough time in it - the only catch in my case being that the data has to be passed through a formatting program before it can be given to the pivot tabler - not yet having found out how to get this last to classify one's data. That is to say it is fine if you have things like 'North', 'West', 'South' and 'East' in text in your data but not if your directions are in degrees from 0 through to 360 and you need something to convert direction in degrees to a cardinal point. I awarded myself a pass on this one.
Next moved on to the Excel find and replace command. This refused to find four instances of the string " tone=" out of the twenty or so that were present on the worksheet in question. Which was odd because I was able to find them using Visual Basic code. The only excuse that Excel could have had was that the cells in question were quite large with maybe 20,000 charectars each. I couldn't see anything odd about the context of the tones which Excel couldn't find, so just corrected them by hand. The failure to find will remain a mystery. Fail.
The third test was escaping from a printer crash which locked up the PC. Control+Alt+Delete was not doing anything, the cursor was not moving and so I resorted to power down. Count to 20 and power up. PC boots up OK. Go into Explorer and the PC freezes again. Power off and on again. Try again and the same thing happens. Power off and on again. This time close the PC down again as soon as it has booted up so that Windows gets a clean close down. I thought I had done the trick. Go into Explorer and try to open the Word file which I had been trying to print at the time of the original crash. PC locked up again. Go through the whole performance again, but this time when I surface again, simply delete the Word file rather than trying to get into it. And then, after about an hour and a half of this, I am back up and running again. Or rather recreating the Word file that had been lost. Who would be in PC support? Pass.
So I think that with a little bit more effort I will be able to award myself the order of the geek (second class).
In the meantime, mildy annoyed by the Post Office. Turning over stamps in preparation for the Christmas frenzy, we find we have a whole lot of elderly first class stamps. It seems that although we bought the first class stamps in good faith, thinking we had a contract with the Post Office for the transmission of a first class letter, the Post Office has reneged on the deal. The old first class stamps have to be augmented with a few extra pennies for them to be valid. A very dubious practise on their part. The whole point of buying a stamp which says first class rather than 43p or whatever is that one is insuring against the vaguaries of Post Office pricing.
Second wet ride running to Cheam. One of those days when it is wet, but not wet enough to be worth putting the cape on. So one gets home rather damp.
# posted by Jim @ 1:42 AM 
