it's amazing how times have changed. and haven't changed.

during my "oh yes i had a blog" excitement from a month or so ago, i ambled my way through past posts and came upon one from march 2004.*

here's a snippet.

"i have THE coolest brother and sister in the world. no, seriously. SERIOUSLY. note the capitals. and note that i never use capitals. that must mean something.

here i am on one side of the world, sitting at my computer in utter despair on saturday morning (belgium time) as i cannot figure out how excel works and how to get little graphs to graph stuff that needs to be graphed.

and there is my wonderful brother on the other side of the world, sitting at his computer on saturday night (nz time), about to save my life.

i send him my little excel file. he opens it. there we both are. opposite sides of the earth. in front of two computers. looking at the same data.

then he proceeds, via msn (a simply marvelous lifesaving contraption), to tell me step by step how to make graphs. he says things like 'okay, now highlight these columns, and then press this button'. i follow his instructions. when i get it wrong, i.e. what i end up having on my screen is nothing like what he has on his screen, he figures out what i did. and how to fix it. then he proceeds to say things like 'hang on, let me see, i think this might look even better' and takes me through a different range of instructions that gets me a different graph.

...

and then there's my sister. also very cool. who just saved me about 20 hours of work. literally.

i have these numbers in a table that was created in this programme i use. the numbers have decimal points. with a '.' point like is used in new zealand. however belgium have this weird system where they use the comma instead of the point in excel. i needed the data in excel to make graphs. so i thought i had to go through and change every decimal point into a comma so that excel recognised it as a decimal. this probably makes no sense. oh well. the point is (ha ha ha, the point. get it? obviously you can tell i'm tired and have spent far too long on this computer when i start making jokes like that!) that i have 35 tables, each with 50 rows of numbers and i was going through one table at a time, converting each decimal point to a comma, on every single row. this takes a long time (hence the bad jokes).

rachel came online. i sent her one of the tables and she said she would see what she could do. two minutes later (yep, only two, actually probably not even that to be honest) and she had the solution. man. now it takes me one second, one button, and suddenly all my points are commas..."


there are two key things about this post. one of these things highlights how times have changed. one highlights how things haven't changed.

thing that has changed: technology.
1: msn chat? i don't think i have opened msn in at least 5 years. i'm not saying it doesn't exist. some people use it all the time, but not me. i now use google chat and facebook chat.
2: sending, downloading, opening and editing files whilst explaining what you are doing? how about google docs! oh how that would have helped back then!

thing that hasn't changed: coolness of brother and sister.
1: sister: my sister recently posted about blog comments and the idea that facebook commenting is so much easier than blogger commenting.** she then set her blog up with facebook commenting. i marveled at this fact and decided to copy her. i tried. i really did. but after getting stuck on the first bullet point in the instructions i turned to my brother (this time via google chat).
2: brother: my brother then proceeded to have a play and explain a few bits and pieces and presto! now you can comment just like on facebook. it'll even appear in your newsfeed. give it a go. i dare you.

oh yes, one other thing that hasn't changed? my lack of capital letter usage.

*original post
**rachel's post