Excel Cut-n-Paste Slow

So, I was doing a cut-n-paste maybe 50 cells and it was taking forever. I did this multiple times in all sorts of documents and it always took forever. Though I am not certain what started the behavior, Googling it was proving less than useful until Chief93 over at superuser.com led me to the solution. It was the dang default printer. Somehow it got set to a printer that I no longer have setup on the system. My goodness, how aggravating! I reset the default to the current printer and, viola, cut-n-paste is working as expected again. Thanks Chief93, where ever you are…

Reference: https://superuser.com/questions/397032/excel-freezes-when-copying-cutting-to-paste-elsewhere

Excel VBA: Getting Rid of Merged Cells

I dislike merged cells in an Excel table. Any attempt to format and prettify Excel tables annoys me. It is a pet peeve. Give me a spreadsheet and I am going to expect to be able to be able to dig into data and manipulate it. A simple way to thwart my ability to do this is to add in a bunch of merged cell into your table to make it more “presentable”. I just had such a situation and found a post over at stackoverflow that presents a simple VBA solution that will remove the merge cells and duplicate any data that was in that merged cell into he newly liberated unmerged cells.

Take a gander: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9215022/unmerging-excel-rows-and-duplicate-data

Why can’t I seem to get rid of this blog?

I mean, i don’t do anything with it so why have it? yet when it comes time to renew the domains, i do it. When there is an update to WordPress, i apply it. And now, i have transferred the whole thing so that WordPress is managed within my provider’s cpanel.

What kind of sickness is this that i have, writing out a post no one will read?

Quote of the day.

A friend of a friend (my sister) sort of connection has brought me to today’s quote of the day:

“until recently, i had a “good” job. a “real” job. meaning a job that was turning me into a serious asshole, a cheater, a manipulater of people for my own “successful” ends, and a man abandoning his own wife and son for these demands that kept popping up. because, “hey, a man’s gotta eat”. i now think these thoughts and several like them about “responsibility” and “success” are lies of oppression that we should heed no longer. and in not heeding them, you will become a fool to the world to trust in your god alone to be your provider and protector.” – Jon Perez, from his “1 corinthians chapter three” post.

Viva la Revolution! Makes one wonder what the true opiate of the masses is? Was Karl right or have the we found a better drug for society, the American dream?

Karl Marx

Creating a Relevant and Distinct Culture

I don’t have the answer to this but I found myself wondering about the effect and purpose of culture in society as I read Jason Clark’s post about Cultural Neutering. Our desire to be culturally relevant is born out of a desire to reach people where they are at and to affect the culture that we find ourselves in for the better, to become a part of the society without being absorbed by it. It is an ‘in the world but not of the world” sort of thought, at least for me.

Perhaps my reading of the post is unbalanced but it appears to address the separate nature of the church subculture as a wholly negative state for the church and I simply can not agree with that. Whereas the church’s subculture needs to be reminded that it is designed to engage the culture at large there will always be a measure of healthy separation in the Christian subculture, no matter the society the church finds itself in. The Kingdom of God must be distinctive as well as relevant in order for it to have any use in this world. It’s a both/and situation in my book and should be presented as such lest as we focus on the need for change in how we engage the culture to the determent of the distinctives that the Kingdom of God offers the individuals of that culture to enter into a deeper, more meaningful and beautiful way of living.

The Kingdom of God will always offer a different way to look at the world we find ourselves in, a separate perspective and approach that should bring life into the world. If we are closing ourselves off to the world in our expression of separateness then we must change because we are in danger of loosing our saltiness, but the same would be true if we were to capitulate completely to the whims of society in our effort to be relevant.

I love the thoughts and ideas of the emergent conversation because they challenge and compel me. It has been rightly identified that the church has built up walls around itself for protection and comfort that have closed us off from the world, that is wrong and needs to be changed. I just do not want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and distain our distinctives wholesale in response.

I would also argue that ‘to everything there is a season’, meaning, sometimes it is healthy to withdrawal into the safety of Christian community. When we are hurt and wounded, weak and tired, struggling to just keep our heads above the water, sometimes we must disengage for our health. Jesuits have a concept called the retreat, and have times every year where they separate from the world and immerse themselves in the story of Jesus, meditating on it’s meaning and effect on their life. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, originally created the retreat to be thirty days long. A whole month devoted to nothing more then getting closer to God, separating oneself from the world and examining their place in eternity.

At this point I could go into the need for a distinct Christian culture for people to retreat into for such times of healing, but I am already growing weary of typing this post so I will just throw out the idea and leave it to you for discussion.

Sleep…

sleeping beauty How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:9-11, NIV)

Do not love sleep or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have food to spare. (Proverbs 20:12-14, NIV)

The bible tells use not to love our sleep but sleep is not a waste of time and sinful in and of itself. As I was looking for the above verses, I also ran across this one:

If GOD doesn’t build the house, the builders only build shacks.
If GOD doesn’t guard the city, the night watchman might as well nap.
It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone.
Don’t you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves? (Psalm 127:1-2, MSG)
Me, I can be lazy, getting enough sleep is not an issue. I need to listen more to the first two verses then the last one. But for some of you, my friends, I am concerned. You’re always on the go, always doing something, running yourself ragged with the concerns of this life.

I started thinking about this when I read a Relevant article called ‘Sleep: It Does a Body Good’, and reminded of the topic again with a podcast from IT Conversations called Tech Nation that had an interview with sleep and dream medicine specialist, Dr Rubin Naiman.

Read the article, listen to the podcast and take heed my friends 🙂

Soundbites and ADD

I wonder if the youngsters today ever sit to listen to an entire album? I am not talking about the oldtime vinyl itself rather the collection of songs/tracks that make up a complete work that I affectionately call an album. Well do they? What about the older folks? Is anybody listening to whole albums anymore?

After looking at my recent last.fm plays I caught myself wondering if I was being boring because the last ten where all Don Chaffer, not only that but they were all from one album, What You Don’t Know. I actually listened to the whole thing. Granted it is background music to a busy day but still it made mean wonder if people do that anymore. In our iTunes, single download sort of world, one wonders.

Confessions of an MPR junky.

Actually, this post has little to do with Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) other then it is my source for world news and current events. This morning alone I have heard reported

1. twelve days of rioting in France by the marginalized immigrant population in that country
2. another defense attorney for the senior ex-Bath party officials in Iraq has been murdered
3. a short history of the fifty plus year struggle for the Kashmir province between India and Pakistan and it’s role in delaying relief aid getting to the victims of that massive earthquake
4. two explosions in busy marketplaces in India a few days back, attributed to the Kashmir separatists

I hear all this in the span of the twenty minutes that it takes for me to get to work in the morning. Events that are happening today, as I type, if you will, but have there roots in decades, if not centuries, of human history.

Top all this with the report of a friend who is in the Sudan, or near it, I am not certain, about this poor fellow who worked for an NGO in the area getting shot right in front of his pregnant wife and children and their car being torched. This one has not made the news. How many other events like this never make the news?

What’s my point? I don’t know. It is just that this is the world that we find ourselves in and I find myself asking the reflection in the mirror, “What are you going to do about it?” I can’t change the world but maybe, just maybe, being more aware of the injustice and suffering going on around the world can, at least, act as a catalyst for me act more justly and love mercy in the little part of it that i find myself in.

No specifics here, no answers, just reflections.

The church and our place in it.

(This was meant to be posted this last week. Oops.)

I love this statement that I read today made on this post by messy Christian:

“…we’ve put our emphasis on the wrong place. It should be on people, not on a place. The place should be a tool to bring people together … funny how we’ve made “going to that place” more important somehow.”

It is really interesting that she makes this statement as part of a broader discussion on her choice to “take a break from church� for a few weeks. I think messy Christian is talking about taking a break from her congregation, moreover her congregation within the confines of the building that they meet on Sunday, when she says that she is taking a break from “church�. She is taking a break from all the pressures and responsibilities that are attached to being a part the whole process of making a Sunday service happen, and the confines and strictures that go with it.

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