Mister Ian's Weblog

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  • Getting Philosophical

    Surprisingly, at least to me, Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 – Hour Workweek and The 4 – Hour Body has a podcast. Previously I was not so interested in what he had to say, but lately he’s getting deeply into health and philosophy.

    So recently he had Alain de Botton on the podcast talking about How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton. who has written books, founded The School of Life

    And now just after that he’s had Will MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Y Combinator, and Artificial Intelligence

    One big part of Will MacAskill’s personal philosoply is giving effectively. Here’s an article on it in The Guardian In this interview he mentions Give Well, Real Change for Your Dollar which ranks charities on their effectiveness.

    And if you are interested in helping animals there is also a site Animal Charity Evaluators.

    If you want to find out more in general about charities there is also a site Good Ventures.

    He also has some compelling points about How to make a difference with your career – 80,000 Hours and Doing Good Better

    There is a lot of interesting stuff in this. I’ve got an ever expanding reading list.

    And if you are interested in a broader view you will be surprised with this interview with Kevin Costner on Building His Career, Positive Self-Talk, and Making Dances with Wolves Happen | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

    Finally, as promised on health and physics

  • Canmore Nordic Centre 2

    Ski Trails

    Second day of the season. It was quite warm and there was some needles and debris on the track. Fortunately it has cooled since and more snow has come.

    [sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/20151122.gpx”]

  • Canmore Nordic Centre 1

    Sundog
    First day of the season at Canmore. Great conditions, better that most of last year!

    [sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/20151120.gpx”]

  • City Ride Around Nose Hill

    Fun stuff to do in the fall with two or three hours to spare.

    [sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/activity_935938181.gpx” mlinecolor:#ff0000]

     

  • Alien Bees Studio Equipment For Sale

    Einstein E640

    I had started up a photo studio while in living in Kuwait. Since returning to Canada I don’t do this any longer so would like to sell this Paul C. Buff Inc. professional photographic studio gear. I would like to sell it in one or two batches — not piecemeal.

    All the gear is in excellent condition very lightly used. Some is in unopened boxes. The Einstein units are multi-voltage which is why I used them for international work. Also the Paul Buff radio triggers use the international 2.4 GHz frequency band, not like the Pocket Wizards which use different frequencies for the Americas and Europe.

    If anyone is serious about buying this stuff please get ahold of me via a comment to this post. Generally, shipping is too much and it would be easier if someone, who’s serious about it, come and physically check it out.

    Click below for a listing or here to open a pdf listing.
    (more…)

  • Hyphen Minus Dash

    I was working in Excel matching some strings and they were not matching even though they looked the same on the screen.
    Well it turns out that there are different kinds of dashes!
    A normal dash you use is the keyboard is the minus sign on your keyboard. But there are others that can get put in. In my case there were some normal minus characters but there were also some actual dash characters.
    The difference as described in the link above is the familiar “-”

    Ascii hyphen, with multiple usage, or “ambiguous semantic value”; the width should be “average”.

    But somehow in the data there was also this character, “?” which is

    unambiguously a hyphen character, as in “left-to-right”; narrow width.

    It took some digging to figure this out, looking at the boolean values in the text to see what characters were there.
    So in order to spare me future dash grief, I put together the following Excel function. It’s self explanatory.
    Note that it also deletes spaces as I don’t want any leading or trailing ones in the strings I’m dealing with in Excel. You could comment those lines out of course.

    Function tagfix(ss As String) As String
Dim Counter As Integer
Dim s As String
tagfix = ""
For Counter = 1 To Len(ss)
s = Mid(ss, Counter, 1)
Select Case s
' Comment out the following line
' if you don't want spaces removed
Case " "
' skip spaces
' do nothing
Case 0 To 9
tagfix = tagfix & s
Case "a" To "z"
tagfix = tagfix & UCase(s)
Case "A" To "Z"
tagfix = tagfix & s
Case Else
tagfix = tagfix & "-"
End Select
Next

    Wait there’s more! If you setup the following subroutine you can run the fix on a selection.

    Dim c As Range
    For Each c In Selection
        c = tagfix(c.Value)
        Next c
End Sub