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The army just turned up at our doorstep. Well, one guy from the army did. He was asking if there was any damage from the storm that needed urgent attention, damage to the house.
I sent him next door.
Apart from that I have registered for the council green waste after storm pick-up. I just need to saw up some tree limbs now and drag it to the curbside.

Time to unload the browser again. And I have some great stuff for you all this week. Starting with some geek humour as well as some new toys and news.

Geeks are Sexy post a YouTube video of the Big Bang Theory and Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, their use of the extended version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Check it out!

HP has suddenly become an Excel Tips website! These three pages were linked in their last newsletter.

• Go chart crazy with Excel 2007
• Excel tip: make printing easier
• Excel tip: Data entry made easy with AutoFill

Some great news on the Windows Live front.

First of all A note about Hotmail, SkyDrive and Photos storage space from LiveSide advising that there is now a massive 50GB o free space online available to you as follows:

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1. Hotmail's minimum storage space will be 25GB and this will be ever-increasing as required at the end of each month, making it basically unlimited storage (subject to abuse control)
2. The ability to download e-mail attachments from Hotmail into SkyDrive - allowing these attachments to be shared with others or just kept private in your online folders
3. SkyDrive's storage space will also be 25GB, as reported previously, in addition to Hotmail's storage space
4. SkyDrive will allow uploading of up to 1000 new files stored per month - note that this only applies to newly uploaded files during that particular month, so total storage can well exceed 1000 files (it is unsure whether this also applies to Photos and those Hotmail e-mail attachments downloaded into SkyDrive)
5. Photos will utilize SkyDrive’s 25GB of storage space for storage of full resolution photos

Wow! That should be enough to backup most individual’s personal data. I am going to be setting up a trial run of this and blogging about it later.

Sarah Perez blogs about the new Windows Live Photo Gallery plugins for YouTube and Face Book.

Go straight to the sites: Live Upload to FaceBook Plugin. Live Upload to YouTube Plugin.

Windows Live Wave 3 icons in full size images available on I started something. (Need to be cut from one large image)

The last Live news for this week is a very techy (developer oriented) post about how live mesh applications can really rock from Danny Thorpe.

Nick Hodge writes a well thought out approach to the whole Australian Net Filter Censorship thing.

Hot Hard Ware have an article about Sweden’s Ultra-Modern Underground Data Centre. Built in an old nuclear bunker this thing looks like something from a James Bond movie. When I saw the pics my first thought was “Wow that would be a cool work environment!”

Buzzard Blog has some good points in his article titled Thinking Biblically about Facebook. Taken from his sermon notes there is some very useful and practical ideas for anybody who uses Facebook. Things like not wasting time writing status updates like “Chewing Gum” for example!

Jean-Phillipe Goude has some very cool violin music on his My Space site. Have a listen. Hat tip to Walking Stick. Andy also has some good Facebook Status lessons!

Don’t know how we missed this movie but One Night with the King looks like a good one to try and get a hold of.

A deightfully crunchy yet soft slice that could be served on it's own or with a meal. You could possibly sweeten it up a little and dare to serve it for dessert, as wafers in icecream (minus the cheese of course)

I have had all sorts of problems getting the 8GB of DDR3 RAM  to run in my new Striker II Extreme board. In fact getting the board o run at all has not been easy

It started with CPU INIT errors, and the progressed to BSOD once I got it to POST to BIOS (though couldn’t even get that to happen consistently) and then i started getting CODE INIT errors ( a code that doesn’t even exist in the manual). I gave up and took it back to the shop and they have replaced the board and are attempting to get a stably running system for me. Beyond this blokes skill level! When you read some of these forums below you will se why. So if you have come here looking for answers tot he Asus Striker 2 Extreme Motherboard CPU INIT or CODE INIT errors then read through all these forum links below.

Picture Credit AnandTech Review

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Everybody else stop reading unless you want to be bored by a long technical story only serious geeks would find amusing, though if you are serious geek you can't now stop reading and still continue to think of yourself as one. Hmmm got you haven’t I?

My only comment on the CPU INIT error is you do not need to wait 12, 3 or even 2 hours after taking the battery out. In fact you don’t need to take the battery out. I found that pressing the CMOS CLR button followed by the power button some 20-100 times will get it to start eventually. Neither do you need to remove all RAM chips except one or even video cards. It seems to me that this problem is more about a very sensitive voltage requirement for the RAM. I got it to boot to bios with 3 video cards and 8GB of RAM numerous times. However i couldn’t get it to consistently do it which is of course a necessity for a stable system – something the Striker board seems incapable of providing and DDR3 RAM in general seems unlikely to be able to achieve with any of the current boards out there. Please if you have a MB with more than one PCIe slot (preferably populated by more than one graphics card) and 4GB plus of DDR3 RAM running smoothly let me know! And by smoothly I mean you turn it on and it runs first time and goes for at least a week before needing to be restarted!

The following links are organised by the boards I have research though I have only had experience with the Striker so far. It seems likely that my shop will try more than one board. I don’t have the time to spend on this right now. (Or the patience.)

Oh and one more thing. To the inventers of the idea that computer cases work best with the power supply at the bottom with a fan opening facing up I hate you!. Yes hate. As In want to hunt you down and paint anti PSU in bottom of case signs on your bathroom mirror in dripping red lipstick. After following the erroneous advice to remove the battery for the 7,000th time I dropped the slippery little sucker into the PSU through the fan grill. 20 minutes of shaking later I had sweat running down both arms before the battery decided to navigate its way back to the grill for removal.

Asus S775 Striker – II – Extreme Motherboard 790SLI

• Specifications
• ASUS drivers
• ASUS Striker II Extreme forum
• AnandTech Review

CPU INIT error fixes

• http://kostakiss.com/blog/2007/07/08/asus-striker-extreme-cpu-init-error/
• ASUS forum procedure 1
• ASUS forum procedure 2
• ASUS forum procedure 3
• Toms Hardware forum 1
• Toms Hardware forum 2
• Searchwarp forum

CODE INIT

• ASUS Forum

ASUS P5E3 Premium/WiFi-AP @n

• Specifications
• ASUS P5E3 Premium/WiFi-AP @n Forum
• Problems with 8GB Memory
• More problems with 8GB Memory
• DDR3 Memory recommendations

ASUS P5K3 Deluxe

• ASUS P5K3 Deluxe Forum
• Benchmark Reviews

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-EXTREME

• Specifications
• Clunk Review
• Benchmark Reviews

What a lot of fun we had, assessing the storm damage from last night. As you can see from the tree there was a lot of strong wind last night. That tree would have stood close to 4 meters high, now it stands about 60 cm high.
As you can see by the other tree, we had a branch land on our guttering. No damage to the house fortunately but that meant another branch had to be removed.
The house seems to be unscathed, though the fence is not quite so lucky. The way the fence leans in the photo does not do it justice, it makes itlook like there is a trick to the photography, when really there isn't and in real life it leans more so, but does not look to be going anywhere. Phew!
Just waiting for the real estate to get back to us in regards to what they will do. They have been inundated with calls due to the storm damage from last night.
We aren't a real emergency, fortunately.
Our neighbours above us lost tiles off their roof and now have water throughout their ceiling and house. The neighbours below us almost had their house flooded due to bad plumbing. Oh, and our fence looks like it could fall on them. They have only lived there for 2 months now! Another neighbour has had their pool filled with mud. I think I heard some pothole covers put back in place last night also.

I am combining the function of the week with a request I had to write some VBA code to use it. (Note the VBA function is not always the same as the application function).

Here is the question I was asked:

I have two columns - One "AA" and the other "AB"
I want to fill down the column AB based on the results in "AA" but I'm
confused about how to get the individual data from AA2 into AB2 - for
example...
Dim AAcell As Range
Dim ABcell As Range
For Each AAcell In Range("AA:AA")
If IsEmpty(AAcell) Then
    ABcell.Value = ""
Else
    ABcell.Value = Int(AAcell.Value)
End Sub
I'm sure this isnt' right/correct - as it isn't working - LOL - but I'm not
sure how to put it...

Reading this through I understood that the reader wanted to be able to fill a column based on another column. If the first column had a blank cell he wanted that repeated in the new column. All other entries in the new column were to be the INTEGER of the number in the first column. I have provided the code used to make this work at the end of this article. Click Read More to continue.

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The INT function simply rounds any number down to the nearest integer. An integer is a whole number (no fractions or decimal places) but can also be positive or negative. The syntax in VBA is exactly the same as in Excel.

The problem could be solved by creating a formula like =IF(AA1="","",INT(AA1)) and copying that from AB1 down to the bottom of the range.

The VBA solution however is very elegant and I tested it on a spreadsheet with a little over 110,000 rows and it ran in less than a second. If you use this in Excel 203, be sure to replace the value for the bottom cell.

Assumptions:

Spreadsheet has non contiguous data in column A (could be any column) that needs to be replicated in column B with the integer of that data. If the cell in column A is empty then it needs to be empty in column B also.

All non empty cells in column A contain values. (Text will break this code but it could be error handled)

Here it is:

Option Explicit
Option Base 1
Dim n As Single, x As Single
Dim newrange(), firstrange()

Sub fillrange()
'this procedure was written by Tim Miller to fill a range based on another range not being empty
'find bottom cell - replace 1048576 with 65535 for excel 2003
    Range("A1048576").End(xlUp).Activate
    firstrange() = Range(ActiveCell, ("A1"))
    n = ActiveCell.Row
   'set the new range array size
    ReDim newrange(n, 1)
    'build new array
    For x = 1 To n
        If Not firstrange(x, 1) = "" Then ' ignore blank cells
            newrange(x, 1) = Int(firstrange(x, 1))
        End If
    Next x
    'paste newrange array in to target range
    Range("B1").Activate
    Range(ActiveCell, ActiveCell.Offset(n - 1, 0)).Select
    Selection = newrange()
End Sub

The last 72 hours have been very intense. My body rhythm is a bit our of whack as a result.

Last week I was working 9:30 or 10:00 AM starts through to around 6PM, breaking for dinner, family, sport, time with Jude, and then recommencing work around 10 or 11PM and working through to 3 or 4 AM before going to bed. This cycle works best for me and my clients both local and international.

However Friday night I worked right though and then went to a clients Saturday all day. By 6PM Saturday night I was cactus and snoozed while babysitting the 3 youngest who had a movie marathon while Jude was out with Miranda at a fancy schmancy ladies thing. When she returned around 9:30 I was half snoozing in the kids bedroom while they were going to sleep. Of course that failed miserably once they heard the door open and their mother come home! Being awake I went back to work until Jude stopped me around 2AM and said “go to bed” in that
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“she shall be obeyed” tone of voice!

Sunday I woke around 9:30 (after Jude and kids had gone to church without me and started work. I skipped lunch (and going to rellies) and worked through til 5PM when we got smashed by the biggest storm in 10 years. Initially we thought it was just a normal little thunder storm and kept all the PCS and servers running (they are all protected by UPS. However after the power flickered a couple of times and then went out altogether we started shutting things down. Too late for one brand new monitor – it blew up before it even got turned on!

A client turned up to collect some new hardware he had bought and had to stay parked outside for a while – the rain was note even horizontal – it was like being inside a washing machine, The wind was very intense and visibility was literally about 4 metres. You could see the air filled with water and spray being thrown around every which way.

We waited til the rain eased off enough to go and cook on the BBQ in the rain. Ben stayed with us as it was too dangerous to drive for a while. After dinner I snoozed for an hour or so. Then we lit candles and storm lanterns and settled in for a relaxing time with no work to do. After putting all the kids to bed in the living area (camped out) Jude and I played cards by candle light before heading for the sack.

Power was out until 2AM and once it came back on I started working again. It took me 3.5 hours just to clear the emails from the last 2 days and get to the point where some sanity has returned.

I have been trying to build my new super duper computer. However the mongrel of a motherboard is faulty and as a result I have moved my workstation out to the school room. I have just two monitors running on my old computer while I figure out a replacement motherboard and replace the new dead monitor (that blew up).

Now it is time to settle in for a long hard week of work and I have a lot of comments on this blog to respond to about Excel problems also. These will be dealt with shortly. Thanks for the comments.

Well, tonight has been interested.
I read a story by candle light (the light of a few candles), had a bbq dinner and slept all of the kids together.
We have just come out of a nice long blackout, after a horrendous storm - http://news.google.com.au/news/url?sa=t&ct=au/0-0&fp=4920c9f00786b2ae&ei...
We had the heavy lid of the compost bin torn off and thrown around the yard, our largest tree snapped in half, the branch of another one snapped and lying across the roof (yet to inspect that one better), and our fence is now leaning at an akward angle towards our neighbours roof (have to get the real estate onto that one).
So, this means our monday morning will be spent cleaning up after the storm, by pruning trees, and on the phone to the real estate.
Power was restored at 1.45am and there are still many houses without power yet.

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.

Windows live essentials – completing the Windows 7 experience. More good sneak previews.

Live Mesh to support devices and peripherals. Picture credit Liveside

Windows Home Server consumer grade add ins discussed.

Gary Hess gives a detailed explanation on how to use Google Analytics to track your RSS subscribers.

Laurel Papworth is calling for photo protests for the planned internet filter censorship here in Australia.

Corey Vidal of YouTube fame for his dancing has written and performed an awesome a capella 4 part harmony tribute to John Williams and Star Wars. Worth watching just for the sheer genius of his performance.

Check if the game you want to buy can be run on your PC – from the Hack How to blog.

Good news for breastfeeding mothers – and their babies – their lungs will be boosted as a result. according to a new study. Source - BBC news

Movie, Game and other miscellaneous themed fonts.

Some Web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Internet Explorer 8 includes a Compatibility View feature that displays Web sites that were created for older browsers as they were designed to appear. You can enable Compatibility View in Internet Explorer or on the Web server. This knowledge base article provides the workaround. (css hack)

Chumbys are really cool looking web content streaming devices. great for bedside tables or the kitchen or pool side BBQ. Australian users can get these from Internode.

I created a new missions website for the Rivers Baptist Sri Lanka short term missions trip for 2009 using Ning.