I hate places that drop ship from Amazon.

“Let’s take this offline.”

“Ok. Sounds good.”

Shuts computer off. Goes outside.

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.

My electric bill last month would have been $1,700 at that rate. We would just have to freeze to death.

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.

Delivery services hate this one simple trick: Going out to eat/takeout.

I lolled at this comment.

Yeah… Adonis… Buddy… You should actually read those Bible stories you’re citing.

Moses: Banned from entering the “promised land” as punishment for demonstrating a lack of faith in God.

David: Has an affair with Bathsheba. She gets pregnant. He has her husband assassinated in an attempt to cover it up. God sends the prophet Nathan to tell David that life from then on will be a Game of Thrones level clusterfuck and boy was it ever.

Paul: Religious nut. God appears to him in a very “shit your pants” kind of scene to ask Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?” After getting a change of underwear, he gets told to go spread the news of Jesus to a [probably] very skeptical audience, considering his reputation for torturing and murdering Christians. Gets shipwrecked, imprisoned, and eventually [presumably] executed by the Roman Empire.

You know what those three guys have in common? They all fucked up. Some worse than others. And they all faced harsh consequences for their moral failings. So, if you’re looking for corelaries between Trump and those guys, maybe the most glaring one is that we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. The part where he is held accountable for his misdeeds.

☹️

Salesforce needs no help ruining their own image. Their software is just a giant smoldering pile of shit.

Well he promised to “run it like a business.” Unfortunately, most of his business experience is scams and running casinos into the ground.

I often VPN to my home network while on the go. The overall web experience is so much worse without DNS level ad blocking.

He should resign as governor because I guarantee he does not have time to do both jobs at the same time.

That said, Trump received 60.22% of the popular vote in Louisiana in 2024 so I’m gonna guess they’re fine with it. Republican voters are usually fine with their politicians doing nothing to improve society. In fact, that’s kind of a selling point.

Netflix: Releases a new show

~ 3 Days Later ~

“The new show has had less than the projected 860 billion views? Fuck. Cancel it. Cancel it now!!”

Nah. We need flogging the merchants in the temple Jesus.

Those Protectli Vaults are neat little devices.