Defective Yeti is starting up a new “National Novel Reading Month” (NaNoReMo) event.  The syllabus goes out on Monday.  The pick?  Lolita.  So, if you’ve never read it, or are intersted in reading it again, it should be fun.  I’ve read it–and loved it–but I’m not sure if I want to dive back into it [...]

We drove up to Columbia, South Carolina this past Saturday and took Haden to the zoo.  It was Gina’s birthday.  So it was a special occasion for both of them: I uploaded a few pics from the visit under the zoo tag.  And, of course, all of these are now part of the Haden photoset. [...]

Joe Biden did a fine job in the vice presidential debate last night.  His rhetorical prowess was impressive–something, in fact, to be studied–as was his superior grasp of foreign affairs and the details of his own, his running mate’s, and his opponent’s records.  Sarah Palin’s repeated dodging and yes/no replies to questions–freeing her up time [...]

I often find myself helping people crunch numbers in Excel that are generated by some other database system and exported as CSV.  These are generally log files of some sort.  The data gets exported as CSV and pulled into Excel.  Then you go about inserting formulas to get the various sums and counts that are [...]