If people don’t understand it, that actually does mean it is unclear. That’s practically the definition of unclear. Please don’t tell me that doesn’t mean it is unclear.
P.S. And don’t insist that if I think it’s unclear, I obviously don’t hear anything I don’t want to hear, that is fucking obnoxious with my sensory issues. This isn’t here, it’s elsewhere, but I need to vent here.
Shelter-at-home. Great time to get to some of those projects around the house that I never make time for because I hate them.
Finally grouting the bathroom floor of the bathroom remodel that realistically started on Thanksgiving of '17
Everyone always offering to help out, but as I am the one member of the household who has the physical stamina AND knowledge to do most home repair, realistically what people can do is fetch and clean.
And no one wants to do that.
So after breaking my knees yesterday, I get to clean up the mess I’d asked to be cleaned up when I had gone to rinse off the dirt and grit left behind when an amateur grouts.
Oh well, the fucking grouting is done for now.
So the default in search engines is straight men who don’t know how to spell?
I’m sure the full text would include pogrom. But that’s either incompetent search engine spamming (who is going to visit a porn site while researching pogroms? Aside from Andrew Anglin?) or some sick genocide-fetish porn with search engine spamming.
Probably so… 
Dear Excel,
I know we have a relationship of sorts, but I need you to understand something.
When I’m importing a .csv file, please, don’t make assumptions.
When I import 5000 rows of data, and the entries in what will be column A consist of three letters and 4 digits…please.
PLEASE.
Please do not think that because some of these entries start with three letters you think of as Months - such as JAN, MAR, APR, SEP - decide that I want THESE cells to be dates. I don’t.
And if I do want them to be dates, I can change that formatting myself.
Yours etc.,
W. Platt
Edit
PS - There’s this little thing called ISO 8601. So, it’s kind of a standard in the rest of the world, and Its the way I want my dates formatted. So maybe, couldya, default to that?
Excel needs to be killed. Executed. All traces burned out of net and all clones smashed to scrap.
I’ve been telling clients, customers, and less technically-oriented workers for 15 years, no, that can’t be imported into your database because the data’s corrupt, since you opened it in Excel. Never put any important data into Excel, or expect to get anything useful out of it. It’s a fun toy to play with, and useful for simple spreadsheets that are only going to be viewed by eye within Excel, but there’s no way to get valid data out of it or enter data without it being corrupted.
Luckily at my current job, we’ve convinced everyone to use proper CSV editors instead of Excel. Sometimes stuff still comes out wrong but now it’s due to a mistaken mapping or some reasonable mistake instead of everything always being wrong due to people who insist on intentionally pumping the data through that mess.
What do you recommend?
Yes. What would you recommend?
Where I work it’s wall-to-wall Excel.
This can be a kind of hard-sell for some people, but what has helped where I work is that the developers use one of the Jetbrains IDEs that has a built-in CSV editor plugin (as well as built-in XML highlighting and linting). Our support people sometimes have to work with CSVs and XML files sent by customers.
So we just took a bit of time one day and got all the support people set up to use the IDE as well, showed them how the syntax highlighting and checking for XML and the data-editing mode for CSVs could make their lives easier and save them the trouble of putting broken data into the system and then having to fix it. (By making edits to a file in the IDE and also in Excel and showing how Excel broke it with things like automatic date conversions, stripping leading zeroes, and adding a BOM but the IDE didn’t, and showing how editing the XML file in something like Word could transparently screw up quotes and stuff, while the IDE made it easier to spot errors.) They still use Excel for some things, due to its formulas, but will run the output through the IDE to check it.
Another one that I’ve recommended in the past is https://csved.sjfrancke.nl/index.html - a tool that is clearly function over form. It has quick and easy functions for things like ‘capitalize everything in this column’, ‘remove duplicates’, split or join columns, formatting by column, sorting, slicing, splicing, transposing, etc. They’re all just kind of thrown into the UI a bit haphazardly, but it’s a real timesaver if you need to do a serious reformat/restructure on a file. For mac and other platforms, there are a couple of alternatives if you search for alternatives to CSVed that may have a better UI, but I haven’t tried them yet.
There is a niche there where something with the power of CSVed but really good UI polish and ease-of-use features could fill.
I am finding this discussion weirdly fascinating.
Or one of my long running pains - WordPad. Yes, let’s make this half-baked application whose only legacy is the mainstreaming of RTF and make it a default XML editor.
But FINALLY I can have my revenge.
The Spring 2020 release of Windows 10 finally lets you remove it.
It sounded familiar, so I went and grabbed it and installed it and remember using this once. It got the job done I needed doing, but, yeah, it needs a UI overhaul. Or maybe I just need to use it more.
Notepad++ needs a good CSV plugin. I know you can do some columnar work it it, but the workflow is meh
Someone firing a painblower, and now they’ve left it idling outside the apartment, still noisy, shaking everyting, and poisoning the air.
My venerable cell phone may be on its last legs… and while I have some clue what’s wrong, I have no idea how to fix it.
I’ve been running a Samsung Galaxy s4 for years now. Every so often, its hard drive (really a microSD, I know) starts to fill up, it complains, I delete things, it gets better.
That’s not working this time. In fact, it’s telling me the hard drive’s nearly full, to the point that some things won’t work any more. I’m not sure how. I stopped loading new apps onto it ages ago, and have been slowly pruning away the ones I’m no longer using. I store all photos taken, downloads, etc. to the extra MicroSD card, and whenever possible, I load the extra apps onto it too. So how the heckin’ heck is my phone stuffed to the gills?!?
I’ve tried wiping the cache partition-- no dice. Tried deleting some apps-- they were so small as to have no effect, and I am rapidly running out of sacrificial lambs. I try looking for duplicate files, but the file manager serves up so many files from the extra microSD card that it’s useless.
If anyone can recommend some strategy to fix this (short of a factory reset), I’m all ears. And I’d even consider a factory reset, if I can figure out how to back up my texts and app-generated files. (I’m mostly sure my Contacts are backed up by Google. Need to double check.)
If all else fails… I’ve had my eye on a refurbished Note 9 over at Backmarket.com for a pretty decent price. I wanted to put off spending the money for as long as possible-- but I’ve run this phone far longer than its expected lifespan (5 years, at least) so maybe its time is up.
Help, please?
Edit to add: I deleted the .thumbnails and .face folders, and that got rid of the error message… for now. It’s down to 8.76 GB out of 9.72 GB. I wonder if there are other unneeded caches to purge.
When technology requires cheat codes.
Trapped in the US but still teaching Chinese children English online. My most advanced students are a pair of twins whose parents want them to be taught purely in English by a native speaker, as opposed to me having a Chinese assistant to occasionally help translate or teach the second half of the class.
I’ve been tasked, on quite limited notice, to teach them grammar, a two hour class. I don’t usually teach formal grammar classes and that’s a lot of time to fill, so I requested that my boss send me the materials she usually uses for this lesson, so I can translate them and use them as, at least, the foundation of my lesson.
On the first page of the PowerPoint, I’m confronted with “the four basic English verb tenses”…
I had to run monthly subscription reports for allllllll the active publications put out by HOUR Media. And then print them on 11x17 paper. And then go over them and find errors and make corrections.
I’m so glad I don’t have to do that any more.
I know so little about grammar that I’m not sure what is being implied by this sentence.
