Nice People Thread No. 14, all Nice and Proper

zagubov

PasturesNew wrote: »

Blimey David Bowie died!
Didn't expect that.

He's a major loss to music. Not so long since we lost Lou Reed as well.

mystic_trev

PasturesNew wrote: »

Blimey David Bowie died!
Didn't expect that.

Very sad news. Last time I saw him was nearly 40 years ago! Being skint at the time, I managed to get into concerts free at the old Wembley Empire Pool, by doing stewarding. Saw quite a few of the big names. Pink Floyd, Wings and a few others. Having a T shirt with 'Wembley Security' meant you could wander around freely once concerts had started.

michaels

mystic_trev wrote: »

I read this and thought of michaels...



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-3390519/I-buy-Royal-Mint-commemorative-coins-bulk-credit-card-gain-airmiles-cash-bank-s-refusing-accept-them.html

I hope it wasn't you! It does show how it's possible to get caught out if you try to be a bit too smart with moneysaving.

I started a discusson on Stoozing.com which involves a lot of googling around what 'legal tender' actually means in practice. It was thought that most banks generally won't take commmorative coins but the post office might (but I doubt 29k's worth at a time). We also discussed issues like how heavy a decent sum of such coins would be...so a quick google would have prevented the guy from making that mistake.

SingleSue

Middle son now deposited back at uni, complete with the rest of his drum kit. I've worked out that a third of the miles done by my car are Northampton uni runs. Not any Bucks New uni miles yet, chickened out on that one last week and ex lovveerrr drove in his car. We may not be together anymore but are still good friends and he still does a lot of the uni runs for me.

House is so very quiet again, youngest is absolutely loving it, the cat not quite so much...he misses his Joshie!

michaels

Generali wrote: »

It's using the OR function to recognise whether two cells are populated and then using the IF function in combination only to create an output if both are populated. Not that exciting but a pleasingly neat solution to a problem I have of comparing how a bunch of fund managers have been voting across almost 250,000 resolutions that I can't count by hand.

Dull but by getting this stuff done quickly I get to go back to the interesting stuff.

Something came out of the Xmas quiz this year. There was the thing about Deutsche Bank putting in their staff handbook how to get around sanctions. Well we were looking at stopping investing in another European bank altogether so I wondered who else had been sanctions busting in much the same way. The answer? All of them. From BNP to UBS.

Always nice to use a logical operator as a boolean switch, also useful having ifna now to avoid those very long lines where first you test an expression and then either use the expression if it is valid or set a null value if it is #na

Surely the fact that Iran etc were still doing business when sanctions were on made it obvious that they and the companies they dealt with must have been getting banking services from somewhere so the Americans must have known and yet all of a sudden it is a good reason to impose huge fines after the event?

Generali

michaels wrote: »

Always nice to use a logical operator as a boolean switch, also useful having ifna now to avoid those very long lines where first you test an expression and then either use the expression if it is valid or set a null value if it is #na

Surely the fact that Iran etc were still doing business when sanctions were on made it obvious that they and the companies they dealt with must have been getting banking services from somewhere so the Americans must have known and yet all of a sudden it is a good reason to impose huge fines after the event?

The fines have been coming through in dribs and drabs since about 2009 it's just some (UBS) were relatively minor offences whereas others (BNP Paribas) were huge and involved many parts of a large and complex business.

vivatifosi

Really sad and surprised to hear about David Bowie. More so because he only released a new album last week. It was described by some as his most experimental ever.

I wonder if, with hindsight, he knew he was dying so decided not to put limits on creativity for his last. Space Oddity is one of the most iconic tracks ever.

kabayiri

Generali wrote: »

It's using the OR function to recognise whether two cells are populated and then using the IF function in combination only to create an output if both are populated. Not that exciting but a pleasingly neat solution to a problem I have of comparing how a bunch of fund managers have been voting across almost 250,000 resolutions that I can't count by hand.
...

I'm a database person at heart, so if I have to manipulate data from various sources like Excel I just link it and treat it as a database table.

The most common use for spreadsheets I see on client sites is basically a list formatter. I wonder how many still use just the functions that were in Excel 97.

kabayiri

vivatifosi wrote: »

Really sad and surprised to hear about David Bowie. More so because he only released a new album last week. It was described by some as his most experimental ever.

I wonder if, with hindsight, he knew he was dying so decided not to put limits on creativity for his last. Space Oddity is one of the most iconic tracks ever.

An old friend of mine was on the BBC radio earlier talking about Bowie. He was intro'd as a music journo but I always think he does much more detailed music bio's these days. It seems a busy period at the moment, as so many of these iconic rock stars hit a period where illness catches up.

I got the impression there's been a lot of reshuffling of stuff over the last couple of weeks in Bowie's diary. Things can change quickly with the big "C".

My thoughts are with his family.

vivatifosi

kabayiri wrote: »

The most common use for spreadsheets I see on client sites is basically a list formatter. I wonder how many still use just the functions that were in Excel 97.

Unroll I upgraded recently, I had 2000 for home and small business use. I upgraded for two reasons... 1) I use office 2010 at work and the look of it had become too dissimilar, plus 2) concern over security.

FWIW I have long thought of Excel as one of Microsoft's better products. For most uses it has always done what I need. It is much less frustrating than Word or PowerPoint, and probably Outlook.

It does seem that propensity to use Excel should be up there with being Jewish, having strong opinions on mushrooms and proximity to Herts on the NPT demographics list.