Narangba Community

Look what we got in the mail today! Lots of nice goodies in there. I love getting mail, particularly parcels, which are presents and then from a different country.

To see a full write up on what we received you can check out hubby’s blog post about it all.

Apart from presents, we have shifted around a couple of rooms in the house and I now have my own office (well hubby has a desk in it for his gaming/work pc). In my office I have my computer desk, sewing table, and craft table (plus mum’s mannequin). We also have the large green couch, school cupboard, filing cupboard and his desk.

While hubby and I were moving/cleaning things, I sent the two older girls outside to clean up the yard and then to mow it. They did well on their first attempt and have both expressed a desire to do it again at a later date. I will let them mow the back yard but I will still trim the edges and mow the front yard.

I just received an amazing package in the mail. Delivered to the door in fact. It had been kindly opened for us by Australian Quarantine – I think they thought we were hiding our cocaine in it. The smell of the chili would have confused the sniffer dogs no end.

Let me back track.

A few years ago I started reading www.reallivepreacher.com. I bought his book and read that as well. noticed that he was using Drupal to run his website. Some time later I ended up talking to Gordon and he expressed his frustration with where the site was at. I glibly offered to look at it for him – for free!. A couple of years later (actually I have no idea how much later) Gordon and I are really good mates. I have been working on his site for free all this time – something I love doing for him. In response he has been touting me around  both on his site and to people he knows. Between us we put together the ccblogs.org site. I say between us because he pulled the community together, I only built the site and provide backend support. We did another site www.materialmedia.net for a friend of theirs, Elizabeth. Jeanene now manages this site. Then we rebuilt Jeanene’s website www.gracefullthings.com. I did this for a nominal fee largely because of the ubercart shopping cart implementation we put in. I had never done this before and I treated this job as an R&D job. Well one thing led to another, and I did a bunch of stuff for Gordon and Jeanene that they think took me a lot of time :)

Jeanene hinted that she wanted to send Judith a necklace as a thank you. I replied and asked her to include a game that I couldn’t buy here and offered to pay for it. Jeanene wouldnt hear of it and said she would buy it for me as thanks.

A few weeks went by but the package just didn’t come. I wondered why. Then a sneaky  little email from Gordon let me in on the secret. Jeanene was stocking the package with Texas Goodies for us. and not just going and buying the first thing she saw.

Here is a list of all the amazing things that arrived today:

• 2 necklaces - beautiful hand crafted necklaces from www.gracefullthings.com
• 2 bags of Mexican chewing gum
• A large bag of Arbol Chili Pods
• A small bag of  Whole Piquin Chili
• 2 bags of seasoning
• A jar of Tomato Garlic Salsa
• 2 goats milk candy wafers
• Pecan candy
• Mexican drinking chocolate
• Fritos original corn chips
• A recipe for cooking Texan Chili
• Sid Meiers Civilization IV – Colonisation

Wow!

Thanks very much Gordon and Jeanene.

I don’t usually do this because they are easy to make but so much easier to break. Instead of making a specific resolution, I though I would make a generalised one.

To improve my health, be more creative and try to de-clutter.

Health wise (being a little more specific here), I would like to include healthier meals more often, be more active, and reduce (but not take away completely) my sweets intake. Having received a new line trimmer for Christmas (yes I wanted it), just starting it will increase my activity level. I also want to try incorporating more vegetarian meals, and buying better sausages (the current ones aren’t the best, but are good for when you have no money). I want to be looking and feeling good by the time of my sister’s wedding at the end of the year.

Creativity – I hope to draw, sew, cook, and maybe even paint more. I want to produce nice clothes for myself, that fit well, clothes for the kids and even a pair of shorts for hubby. I want to try new recipes, create new recipes and put more recipes up on my site. I want to practise my drawings so that we have something decent to put on our calendars at the end of the year.

De-clutter – to get rid of the things we don’t need, won’t ever use or are broken. I will however let hubby clean out his own stuff if he so desires, but I will give the kids a helping hand.

Now that I have said these things, I can only try to keep them. I won’t do them all at once, but gradually so as not to overwhelm.

So, now you know mine, what are yours?

I spent the last 4 days in New Zealand with my parents and siblings and their families. Unfortunately the rest of mine couldn't come for various reasons. While spending some time in a kayak yesterday we saw some frogs at the edge of the little lake. I was able to get the camera on the kayak – very carefully – and manoeuvre right up to the edge of the bank and snap some awesome shots – I even got a dragonfly landing on the frogs nose. I also snapped some shots of a tui feeding on the flax flowers. That was hard as these birds don’t sit still for more than about half a second. More shots on Flickr

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What a fun day we had.

It started off with an early wake up (expected) by the kids after a very late night, followed by present giving and then preparing for the day. (And also the hatching of another dragon)

Mum came over at 8am and we all had a nice brunch together, followed by more gift giving.

It wasn’t long before I had to rush Hubby off to the airport so he could catch his flight to NZ for his own family ‘reunion’. On the way there I was able to observe the highway and see how jammed up it was on the north bound road which meant I would need to take an alternative route to my sister’s place out in the country. A quick stop home for my sunnies and everything else I forgot (M4 was asleep most of the road trip there), then it was out to the back roads for the trip to my sister’s place. The drive was quite good and pleasant.

I spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early hours of the evening enjoying a quite relaxing time. There was lots of laughter, water guns being sent back outside, kids playing with puppies and getting soaked, car driving in the back paddock and a lot of good laughs and conversations. J9 even had her turn behind the wheel and if I new how to post videos from my mobile phone on here I would show it. She was remarkably good for someone who has never driven a car before, though she did love doing circles with increasing speed though!!!

All in all it was a fun day and we enjoyed it with good company out in the country (the weather was perfect too, beautiful breezes and mild temperatures).

Wow!

Mooncake is real easy to use and fantastic.

Its only in Beta right now but its free. It uses the Microsoft SeaDragon DeepZoom technology combined with silverlight to build massive photos files into an easy to use web based interface.

See my sample below. Its easier to use than describe.

Basically I have added a collection of close up photos from my flickr account (all point and shoot to do this) and it creates a silverlight application using the deepzoom techniology.

What that means is that it only downloads the portion and resolution of the photos you are seeing. As you drill in by clicking to zoom in and shift clicking to zoom out it loads the resolution to view what you can see.

Its a great way to let your friends and family see your high res pics easily without requiring them download gigabytes of photos.

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I normally don’t suffer from tech woes – but – this week has been hell!

The good news is that is hasn’t affected machines I set up for clients. I set up 2 new laptops with no issues at all and delivered one – one to be delivered boxing day. Each of them has LiveMesh running successfully. When I delivered one last night I et up live mesh on their existing XP PC and synchronised their data. I then set up an old laptop of mine and a virtual machine (running in bootcamp on a Mac) and attempted to install live mesh. No joy. Tried reinstalling Vista 3 times each machine even using different SKUs. Each time Live Mesh fails to start. I have the Microsoft Live Mesh Tech Team looking at it now.

Then to top it off this morning I awake to find my backup production machine (from which I still haven’t transferred everything over to the new machine) sitting there with a blue screen of death. After restarting it and troubleshooting discovered that the main system OS which is a striped raid running on 10,000RPM drives wouldn't boot. Reason, the raid had a failed hard drive. Being a stripe there is no recovery from this. By the way – never set up your machine using a RAID Stripe for system OS unless you never store any data on that drive. I don’t. I do this to gain speed from my system. So I took both drives out, talked to the shop about the warranty, discovered that they don’t have these drives any more, they have been replaced by the 2.5” form factor drives. I will need to get it sent away and replaced. Being Christmas, that wont happen until early January now. So I whacked a 160GB drive that was sitting on my desk into the machine, booted from the Windows Home Server restore CD, (after disabling the RAID setup in BIOS), connected to the Windows Home Server and starting restoring my system. It is telling me 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. What a blessing Windows Home Server is!

And I am trying frantically to get work one for clients before going off for my first holiday since February 2007 when I had 2 days holiday with the family and friends down at Kingscliffe in NSW. Christmas Day I fly to New Zealand to spend 3 days with my parents and siblings for a family reunion. I don’t want to think about what I need to do when I get back!

PS that’s not me in the picture – just some random lady I found when searching for tech problems. She sums up how I feel today!

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My daughter is looking to sell two of her mice.

They are both female, brown and white in colour and hand tame. They are about 7 weeks of age.

They are gorgeous little mice and make great pets (or maybe a Christmas gift).

She is asking $4 for the pair of mice (that is $2 per mouse)

There may also be more mice for sale in the new year (towards the end of January)

This cruise liner was docked in Sydney when I was there last week. Got this snap with my phone camera through the security fence.

There’s a chap in a dinghy doing something to the anchor – gives you some idea of the scale of the vessel. She looked awesome!

I realised that when I wrote the ISNA function article that I had never written an explanation of VLOOKUP. I want to write up explanations for a umber of other functions in the future like COLUMN, ROW, MATCH and INDEX followed by OFFSET. All these make lots of sense when you use them with the VLOOKUP function. So I though it best to start with this function. I will also say that everything I write about VLOOKUP here applies to HLOOKUP as well. the only difference is the orientation, that is VLOOKUP looks across columns from left to right, and HLOOKUP looks down rows from top to bottom.

The built in Excel Help is very good at helping with this function. However it doesn't point out many of the pitfalls than occur in common use.

The VLOOKUP function syntax has the following arguments (argument: A value that provides information to an action, an event, a method, a property, a function, or a procedure.):

• lookup_value  Required. The value to search in the first column of the table or range. The lookup_value argument can be a value or a reference. If the value you supply for the lookup_value argument is smaller than the smallest value in the first column of the table_array argument, VLOOKUP returns the #N/A error value.
• table_array  Required. The range of cells that contains the data. You can use a reference to a range (for example, A2:D8), or a range name. The values in the first column of table_array are the values searched by lookup_value. These values can be text, numbers, or logical values. Uppercase and lowercase text are equivalent.
• col_index_num  Required. The column number in the table_array argument from which the matching value must be returned. A col_index_num argument of 1 returns the value in the first column in table_array; a col_index_num of 2 returns the value in the second column in table_array, and so on.

If the col_index_num argument is:

• Less than 1, VLOOKUP returns the #VALUE! error value.
• Greater than the number of columns in table_array, VLOOKUP returns the #REF! error value.

• range_lookup  Optional. A logical value that specifies whether you want VLOOKUP to find an exact match or an approximate match:

If range_lookup is either TRUE or is omitted, an exact or approximate match is returned. If an exact match is not found, the next largest value that is less than lookup_value is returned.

Important: If range_lookup is either TRUE or is omitted, the values in the first column of table_array must be placed in ascending sort order; otherwise, VLOOKUP might not return the correct value.

If range_lookup is FALSE, the values in the first column of table_array do not need to be sorted.

• If the range_lookup argument is FALSE, VLOOKUP will find only an exact match. If there are two or more values in the first column of table_array that match the lookup_value, the first value found is used. If an exact match is not found, the error value #N/A is returned.

Common Uses of VLOOKUP.

I use VLOOKUP frequently – many times a day and in many different ways. While I am aware that there are limitations to how it works (more on these soon) in the following circumstances it performs well.

Example: I have 2 columns of the same data from two spreadsheets – different versions or different data sources. I want to know if all the data is in both spreadsheets, and if not which data is missing from which sheet. Typical scenarios include account codes from an accounting system, names from a payroll system, lists of suppliers or customers, lists of gas wells from a an engineers data collection sheet etc.

The data may be several hundred or thousand lines long – and it is not time efficient or practical to scroll up and down the two lists comparing them. Sorting them doesn’t necessarily work, and if there are duplicates then looking at the total number in each list isn’t going to help.

Solution: I would copy and paste the two columns of data into column A of two separate sheets in a temporary work book (or maybe work with it in the source files and delete my work afterwards). IMPORTANT: I would then sort each list in ascending order.

In column B of Sheet1 I would make a formula like so: =VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!$A:$A,1,FALSE). After filling this down for each item in column A It is very easy to filter out all the #N/A items. These are the items that do not appear in column A of Sheet2.

In Sheet2 Column B I would write a formula like so: =VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet1!$A:$A,1,FALSE). After filling this down for each item in column A It is very easy to filter out all the #N/A items. These are the items that do not appear in column A of Sheet1.

Example: I am trying to balance a set of data that is being summarised from a source set using SUMIF formulas to group the data into some top level values. The sum of these subtotals should equal the sum of the original data.

Eg RAW Sales data totals compared with the sum of the sales data by Salesman suing the SUMIF formula does not equal for some reason. I have checked and every line of raw data has a salesman’s name against it and each unique salesman’s name is being included in the subtotals. Or so I think. In actual fact there is a typo and there are some sales mans names that have an extra space after the name, or maybe a couple of letters transposed. This is a very common error and not easily located in a set of data of several thousand rows. (see a previous post about this problem)

Solution: Assume the salesman’s names from the raw set of data are in column A of Sheet1 and the sales values are in column B. Column C is blank. Column A of Sheet2 is the subtotals of salesman’s names (appearing once) with the SUMIF subtotals in column B.

In column C of Sheet1 I would enter a formula that compares the salesman’s name from column A against the subtotal page on Sheet2 like so:=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!$A:$A,1,FALSE). Once again after filling down for all the data in the raw data sheet, I can filter on this column and any #N/A values will highlight the problems – spelling mistakes, extra spaces, etc.

That’s enough for this week. Next week I will continue on with more on VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP – more scenarios of day to day use of them, and some of the common traps, including why sorting is important.

Oh the things I do for you my gentle readers!

Some more nice cheeses were reviewed recently – and at the request of a reader the King Island Dairy Roaring 40’s blue cheese was selected.

I was expecting the cheese to be a raging stinky blue cheese – from the name I guess. However I was pleasantly surprised. The smell wasn't bad at all and the taste was awesome – very nice – I had it in sandwiches with hot chips and chicken – very nice!

The Mersey Valley Sharp and Crumbly series have been favourites in this house and the sweet chilli did not disappoint with kids who don’t even like sweet chilli eating it and declaring it their favourite cheese ever.

A very pleasant cheese.

The Dutch Spiced Gouda was a completely different flavour. I wasn't particularly enamoured of it, but Jude liked it and I said she could have the rest! It was sort of a weird dry dusty flavour. Cant explain it any better than that sorry.

Just a simple request.

If you have contacted me through the contact form on my site and provided an email address on it, can you please ensure that the email address works. Otherwise I can’t contact you!

Thanks!

As a special SpyJournal service to all our geek girl readers and followers I am letting you know that there is a discount on heels, wedges, flats and boots at the new online shoe store Therapy.

All the details are available on the Missy Confidential website who are announcing the discount. Missy Confidential have lots of good bargains and discounts, giveaways and promotions you can enter.

Therapy Shoes is excited to launch their new online store by offering all Missy readers 15% off.
During checkout, simply enter the code MISSY to receive your 15% discount.
Be sure to join the Retail Therapy Club and be the first to know about the season's hot new styles, sale items and special member discounts.
15% VIP Discount: Online offer for Missy Subscribers only and valid for unlimited pairs of shoes paid for in one transaction.

• WHEN
  Online offer from 10th Dec - 30th Dec, 08
• WHERE
  www.therapyshoes.com.au
• TIMES
  Online 24/7
• PAYMENT
  Visa / Master Card/ Bank card / amex

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My latest piece! I was sunburnt, had a pattern I altered and needed to try out, and some spare material that needed using up (which looked good on the 9yr old). So I whipped this shirt up in a couple of hours (triple stitch on the sewing machine for strength and stretch). The neckline is a little dodgy but I am glad I found that out before I went and made those sports shirts I was going to make. Now I can alter it appropriately.

Some of my take aways from this conference:

• Client apps should be experience first, tech second – e.g. they are built for the consumer to use – the back end stuff should be largely invisible.
• These apps should live on the cloud and be able to synch across devices and platforms invisibly.
• 3rd party extensibility is important.
• Authentication and login (including Open ID) on websites can now be performed using the exposed LiveID framework – 460 million LiveIDs in se on the net.
• Twitter back channels can liven up the day – thanks to @NickHodge, @laflour, @aussienick, @DamianM, @kiwitwitter and @JamesHip.
• RSS, ATOM, JSON, SOAP feed data is available from the LOE (Live Operating Environment) to describe changes, news etc from the LOE.
• Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect allHTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

May be more but that will do for now.

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Potts Point is not as flash a place as it sounds. It is next to Kings Cross.

Don’t go to any Thai restaurants in the cross and expect to pay with EFTPOS or credit card – they all only take cash.

It is sad seeing how young the hookers are in the cross.

A 2 star hotel is rated that way for very good reasons – cheap and very basic – however it was clean.

Business class on a plane is much nicer than economy – but they still give you a dodgy plastic knife.

J9 had her birthday party yesterday. It was 20 days early.

She had a great time, as did her friends, and a little bit of sunburn later we all went home and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon.

Anyhow, I will leave you with a couple of pictures my hubby took. (not adding any of the party guests though sorry)

I always liked that song, the one by Monty Python. I think it is a great song to sing when you are down in the dumps or feeling overwhelmed by life. (It is the 2nd song on the list)

If you don’t like the song then you can always play the glad game that Pollyanna plays.

I am going to play a version of the glad game right now.

Bad Vs Good

Live Mesh announces an update affecting all platforms

Windows Vista SP2 hits the streets today - Sarah has a full list of the enhancements and fixes in Vista SP2

Tony Morgan posts a though provoking piece with 10 reasons why he doesn’t like most Christians. I would agree with them all.

Rodney Olsen posted this cool video about technological and futuristic trends. I have added it here also.

WIN2K3 to SBS2008 migration – thanks to Susan the SBS diva

Google Chrome is getting an extensions framework – awesome news brought to us by Geeks are Sexy

Common Craft Explains Windows Live

The New Windows Live site has launched and is open for business

Check my site here.

Look at all these articles explaining the goodness:

Windows Live Wave 3 services launch today

Windows Live update ships: After years of waiting, we create a Group

Windows Live Wave 3: Homepage

Windows Live Wave 3: Photos

Windows Live Wave 3: SkyDrive

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