Friday Timewaster: Excit

Yeah, so . . . I've spent most of the week either reading sentences like this

Recreated by the Spirit through baptism and nourished in the Eucharist, we carry within us a foretaste of God’s graciousness and mercy, ever mindful of Jesus’ promise that the triune God will dwell in those who love Christ and follow his word (see John 14:23).

or working on a massive Excel spreadsheet to generate fifty-some pages of charts showing some correlations between our products and current demands in the marketplace.

Oof. And I like making spreadsheets. So much so that I found a bunch of games to play in Excel.

The best is Excit:

I foresee many hours of nerdy fun!

Excel-erate your life

So, a few posts back, I posted here about how I posted on 43 Folders about my Excel spreadsheets (which I had previously blogged about here ) . . .

Anyhow, two interesting developments.

1. A friend's husband read my posts on 43 Folders and perused everyone else's posts to discover that one poster was a guy he used to work with.


2. When my friend e-mailed me about this Kevin Bacon moment, I remembered that the whole point of the thread was to help some newspaper reporter do research for her story. After some quick Googling, I found the piece and discovered that I was quoted in it. Yay!

Most Excel-literates are wary of becoming too obsessive. Christine Hall, my Toronto friend who uses Excel to plot her Christmas gift-giving, was thinking of opening a spreadsheet this week, but held off. "Starting this early makes it seem so much less heartfelt," she says. "If I do it now it's just 'getting the task done on time and on budget.'"

And the biggest Excel-literates admit their friends keep them from nerding out too severely. Amy writes to 43folders to say her "geekiness knows no bounds." She transcribes Entertainment Weekly's summer and fall movie previews into a spreadsheet, then ranks them in order of her desire to see them and uses a colour code to indicate whether she wants to pay full price or go on a discount night.

"I send the file to my friends so they can add their input in their respective columns, and then I use the information to plan out movie nights. To my friends' credit, they mock me mercilessly and don't actually fill out the chart, but I usually get enough general comments to determine what they feel like seeing."

But Mann says that once you're hooked, it doesn't matter what friends think. "What, I'm not going to use Excel because you think it's dorky?" he says.

So, go check it out:

Stressed? Busy? Excel-erate your life

by Tralee Pearce, Toronto Globe and Mail, 8/26/06

Geekiness Confirmed and Celebrated

So, you know how last time I mentioned my Excel spreadsheet -slash- personal television schedule?

On 43 Folders, there was a request for comments about this topic:

What kind of cool, novel, and non-obvious stuff are you doing with Excel? What’s the wildest, most obsessive, most nerdy thing you ever saw someone do with our favorite spreadsheet program?

I couldn't resist posting. Check it out here and here.

Based on comments from some other people, maybe I'm on to something.

Anticipation

Things I am anxiously awaiting....

• the start of the new television season
• fall movies
  

Since I am a giant geek, I already have my television schedule planned in a giant Excel spreadsheet.

I think I'm going to have to sit down with the Entertainment Weekly fall movie preview and work out my fall film viewing.

Actually, I need to make a list of the summer stuff I want to see (You Me & Dupree, Talladega Nights, Accepted ... and, dammit, Snakes on a Plane).

Anyhow, I already Netflixed the Studio 60 premiere -- which is hi-larious and I can't wait for the rest of the episodes. Of course, I just finished re-watching my SportsNight DVDs the other week, and that just made me sad that there weren't more episodes of that. There was some guy who was writing fan fiction -- he had, like, three or four more seasons' worth of stuff with those characters. I used to get it e-mailed to me, but when I changed e-mail addresses (sucked it up and got a cable modem) I think I fell off the mailing list. Maybe I'll go Google it now and see if I can find it again. . . .