Monday 20 December, 2004

Picturesque New York?

Filed under: Life

Two words for you: Brass and Monkeys.  (Click here for more information.)  It's currently 11°F, which equates to a whopping -12°C, and there was a light covering of snow in Manhattan last night.  It will peak today at 23°F (-5°C).  Yes, it looks picturesque, but at the same time, it leaves your face numb and your ears close to bleeding, particularly with that Nor-Easter wind.  This lunchtime will see a shopping expedition for woollens.

Now that temperatures have got sufficiently low, I really can't believe how (or more to the point, why) we in the UK ever coped with Fahrenheit.  It's such a ludicrous system.  Also, I think the degree sign should have made it to the standard keyboard.  Surely it's more important than that funny ` character that no one uses above the tab button, and could even hold its own against the carat (^) on the six key.

(A lovely little tip here: when you've got formulae going on in Excel, and want to see the formulae instead of their results, just press CTRL+` (that aforementioned key that no one otherwise uses).  This will toggle between the values view and the formulae view, and can be really handy for writing and debugging complex formulae.  You heard it here first.  BTW, that functionality would not be compromised by substituting the ` for the °.  The only use I can think of for the ^ is raising powers in Excel - again, this could be accomplished with a °.)


Posted by dan at 5:13am | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
Comments

I think you'd better get used to the cold sir, last winter we had 18 inches of snow fall in one night. Snow until March. Nothing like it.

Posted by Shanahan, 7:41am, Monday 20 December 2004

Backticks (I think they are called) are terribly useful Dan, for doing such things as:

grep gibberish `find /usr/local/src -type f`

Posted by Rob 6:30pm, Tuesday 21 December 2004

I knew some techie would have some spurious use for it. Could a ° sign not serve the same purpose?

Posted by Dan, 5:14am, Wednesday 22 December 2004
Add comment (all comments are currently moderated)
Your name*
Enter the confirmation code*
Comments *



* denotes a mandatory field