ZOMFG

So I just finished watching the season 1 Lost finale. The funny thing is this - throughout the last two years I've been cognizant of an ongoing debate in the "SF community"* about whether Lost was sci-fi or not. Reach the end of season one and I realize that not only is it SF - it's frigging steampunk. What's more, they've been making audio hints in that direction throughout the first season! Anyway, I'd like season 2 to start . . . oh now, thank you very much Netflix!


*Interesting sidebar - I first wrote "sfnal", which I thought was the generally accepted adjective for of "sci-fi community" but aborted when I decided that A ) the majority of my consumers would not know the term and B ) I couldn't Google up a good definition.

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Excel (and all of Microsoft really) can Bite Me!

Ye Gods I hate most near everything Microsoft.

If you ever need to import data from an Excel file, here are things you should know.

  1. Yes, Excel exports tab-delimited text files.
  2. BUT, it will put up two or three annoying dialog boxes about it designed to scare the end-user.
  3. Oh, and also it will put quotes around any cell that contains a comma.
  4. What about a cell that already had quotes you ask? Oh, well then it will put three quotes around it.
  5. And quotes in the interior of the cell will get doubled.
  6. Windows Excel will export the rows with a carriage-return/newline pair ("\r\n"), just like you'd expect.
  7. Mac Excel will export the rows with a carriage-return ("\r"), unlike pretty much anything else on the planet (excepting devices that actually connected to real physical teletypes). Not a newline ("\n"), like everything else on Mac/Unix/Linux/BSD, but a carriage-return.
  8. On Mac Excel you have to export as "Text (Windows)" to get a carriage-return/newline pair, which is at least reasonable to expect your importer to handle.

An example might be in order. If your cell contains the text:

"The quick brown fox nipped in for a drink at the "Lazy Dog". But it was closed."

Excel will make that into:

"""The quick brown fox nipped for a drink at the ""LazyDog"".But it was closed."""

Basically you have to strip an opening/closing quote pair, and then replace any occurrence of "" with " to get your original data.


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Lead Times Are A Bitch

So today's big science story is that we've found good evidence for dark matter. Today as I'm eating lunch I'm reading the August issue of Discover magazine (Yeah I'm one behind - September came in last week) and run across the article about Mordehai Milgrom and his research into modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). Thing is, the strongest argument for MOND is basically that with no direct evidence for dark matter, MOND is just as plausible. Until two gas clouds run off and collide somewhere in space. Isn't that just like a pair of gas clouds? Unreliable little things.

Feel free to post theories about why my day is synchronistically about the fundamental cosmological equations of the universe. Normally, not so much news about galactic-level structures of matter.

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More pics

Some more pics up at Flickr - these are of the Japanese Garden in Portland. Not as happy with my picture work there today - the lighting was a bit tricky and I was using my older camera as opposed to Karin's new tiny camera. Also the flash kept turning on for my camera - even though we were outdoors. (grumble). It's utterly ridiculous that this huge, dense garden exists smack in the middle of the city like this.

I really need to learn what I'm doing with Photoshop Elements. I wonder if I couldn't fix up more pictures if I had more skill . . . .

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