Moody waterfall

Good thing I took a photo of that bud yesterday. It's gone today. No, it hasn't bloomed or been eaten by the birds. Our neighbours had their lawn service in, and they trimmed the tree. Still big enough to shade me as I run the BBQ, but I'm not going to get anything poked out getting close to it. It probably also means that later in the year we won't get woken up by apples dropping onto the BBQ.

My work life is exciting in all the ways data can be exciting. Damn Excel for trying to be helpful! There are several things that it does that annoy me, but I learned a new one today. In a database extract of some 20,000 rows, it took the perfectly innocent number 6320-1, which is actually a number, turned it into 6320-01-01 and displayed Jan-02. Then it was fussy around changing it back. It's an important field, so I can't have excel playing with it. It didn't do anything with the next row, which was 5821-3, I think. Or with almost all of the other rows. There were only a dozen or so that it changed. There's enough stuff I have to keep track of as I shuffle data around, and I don't need more.

I've known some numbers were prone to being interpreted as dates, and there are a couple techniques to deal with it, but this was above and beyond. There are days I think excel has a fetish about dates. There are lots of times I wish it would be less helpful. Don't get me started on scientific notation and big numbers that look like 10001020030401. Good thing I'm being well paid for dealing with this sort of stuff.

I think if I built a wish list for Excel, I would strip out a lot of the "features". As an aside, do you know how the software industry defines a feature? It's a bug with seniority. (bada boom!) It would never assume that a number was a date, unless told so. It would display exactly what was in the cell, and let you toggle back and forth between a formula and the value. It would properly deal with sheets more than 10,000 lines long when it comes to filtering. (If you don't know, you don't want to know.)

I've never known quite what to think of these two waterfall shots. Same falls, taken only a few minutes apart, similar processing. The dark blue moody look was a surprise to me, although it appeals to me partly because it is such a contrast to the bright sunny day.

Here's one of the components of that last shot, believe it or not, done as B&W. I know at least one person that will prefer the B&W, but you might as well.

Driftwood of the Day