• 5 Posts
  • 273 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle



  • You’re over thinking this. Neither health insurance companies nor any employer that isn’t a complete pile of shit cares if you have ADHD. The only time an employer has even had an official record that I have it is when they have mandatory drug testing and mine comes back positive for amphetamines. If they ask about it at all, usually “I take Vyvanse for ADHD” ends the conversation and it never comes up again.

    Do what’s best for your health and well being.






  • In my experience, Excel gets a lot of developer hate primarily for two reasons.

    1.) They’ve seen it abused way too often. Things like using a workbook as a database or placing a copy to a shared one on everybody’s desktop and treating it like it’s a distinct application. In total fairness, Excel was not designed for either of those scenarios.

    2.) They don’t know how to use it effectively.

    To be clear, I’m no Microsoft fan and there are legitimate things to hate about Excel. But, it can be a very valuable tool in your toolbox if used properly.

    Excel’s bread and butter is data analysis and for that it is a phenomenal tool. Despite many claims to the contrary that I’ve heard over the years, none of the other spreadsheet programs currently available can fully match it’s capabilities.

    I can take data sets from a variety of different sources and parse, combine, refine, and distill them down to a really nice looking report that someone upstairs can read in a small fraction of the time it would take me to whip up an application to accomplish the same thing. If they want to adjust the the fields on the report, it’s super easy to make some quick changes to a pivot table.

    There is a point where Excel is no longer the best tool for the job. In my opinion, the most obvious indicator that this point has been reached is when there’s a need for multiple people to manipulate the contents of a workbook. When that starts happening, it’s time to look for a more scalable solution. If data in an Excel workbook is being used as the “source of truth”, as in raw data is being stored in it rather than it pulling the raw data from elsewhere, that’s a recipe for disaster.

    That said, I also realize that not every organization has the same resources. I’ve worked with plenty of small non-profits that don’t have the money to hire devs to create nice fancy software suites for them and primarily work off of spreadsheets. It’s not ideal but it’s understandable. If they’re doing good work, I’m not going to judge them too harshly for using Excel as a database. In those situations, I usually suggest having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and solid, frequent data backups.

    One of my old bosses, who was an electrical engineer, liked to say, “The choices are often not between right and wrong but somewhere between worst and best”. Sometimes Excel is a good tool for the job. Sometimes it isn’t. Knowing when a particular tool is the right one is learned by experience.




  • What’s funny is their attempts to rebrand Office have just fallen completely flat. Kind of reminds me of when Willis Group bought the naming rights to Sears Tower and all the Chicagoan’s were just collectively like, “Yeah, No. We’re still going to call it ‘Sears Tower’.” Hell, nobody that I know of calls it “Willis Tower.” Nobody calls Microsoft Office “Office 365”. Nobody is going to call it “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” This is just a huge waste of effort by a tech firm that has long since run out of ways to be innovative.


  • I’ve always found it interesting how brands that are either not household names or have been mostly forgotten shaped technology that we use every day. You can find LED bulbs or cheap electronics with the Curtis-Mathes brand nowadays but back in the 60’e and 70’s, they set the standard for repairable TV’s, at least in the US. They basically modularized everything to where there were like 10 replacable parts and the repairman carried all of those with him. They could swap out a bad component in minutes.

    Another one that was never a household name is Allen Organ Company. They make electronic pipe organs, which replicate the sounds of an actual pipe organ, sans pipes. In the early 70’s they created the first fully digital organ. It had a small computer that generated the tones. Even though it had a several large PCB’s and a pretty big footprint for its limited capabilities compared to computers today, at the time it was a pretty impressive feat.