Excel-lent Fun

This past week, I was playing around with the World Cup Spreadsheet that I posted for download on the last blog, and I wound up running across a huge error. As I was popping in numbers in the score section to test it out, I realized that it was taking the wrong teams from the first round and placing them incorrectly into the second round. I tried to follow the string of functions to see if I could correct the issue, but whoever wrote the thing appears to have only learned a few choice functions in Excel and doesn't like to stray from what he knows. I would finally figure out what one function did only to find that it pointed to the results of three other functions that pointed to results of two more. It went on like that about 5 functions deep and I gave up.

I'm no Excel guru. Trust me. I think I know the program really well, but some forums have shown me that I know very little. Guy's are on there talking about pivot tables and background coding and I just have to ignore it from lack of understanding. However, I decided to take a crack at redoing the World Cup sheet because I couldn't help but think that whoever wrote this one was over-complicating the whole thing. I do admit, though, that some of the situations I got into when coding the functions seemed to paint me into a corner, if you will. I was a little stumped a couple times, but it all finally came to me.

This spreadsheet is much better. It's more attractive, in my opinion. It's simpler. And, most importantly, it works right. So, in case you were one of the seven people who downloaded the old one from last week, I suggest that you download this one again, here. I also changed the old link so that people wouldn't get one that doesn't work right. Enjoy!

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World Cup 2010

I'm not a very big spectator sport person. I love sports but my love for them is in playing them not watching others play them for me. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm not saying that. I just don't really care about them.

This puts me into a somewhat unique place among male social circles. See, it's no big secret that men don't talk to each other near as much as women talk to each other. I even heard once that an average woman will speak 4 to 5 times as many words per day than the average man will. I can believe that. Men, don't talk a lot. But, when they do, one of the old trusted subjects is sports. Men will even talk to complete strangers about sports. Salesmen commonly use it to break the ice when meeting new clients. It's almost a universal male tool to get a conversation started, to save one that is losing steam, or to fill an awkward silence.

Unlike a lot of guys, I quietly bow out of the conversation when it turns to sports. Guys will start naming names, throwing stats around, describing plays, etc. I even see the types of guys that probably never played a sport in their life chatting away about batting averages, quarterback blitzes, and personal fouls. Not me. I commonly get caught off guard when I'm not aware of what professional sport is playing currently. The following dialogue is real and has occurred more times than I can count:

Average Joe - "You gonna watch the big game this weekend?"
Me - "No, I'm not really into football."
Average Joe - "I was talking about the fifth game of the World Series."
Me - "Oh."

The two exceptions to my lack of interest in sports is when I either A) know someone personally in the game that I am watching, or B) it's a World Cup year. And 2010, is the year. Beginning June 11th and ending July 11th will be 64 of the most watched games in the world. Each one will have more people watching it than any one of the 44 Super Bowls. It's the largest sporting event on planet Earth. Its fans must wait four years from one to the next, but in June the wait is over. Among the millions watching, I, Lord willing, will be.

A tradition that I began eight years (two World Cups) ago was to keep a record of the outcome of every game played. Eight years ago, I downloaded and printed a bracket and tediously wrote down every game result and tabulated the points and goals for and against. Four years ago, I found a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that all I had to do was plug the scores of the games in. The calculations were done for me. This year I was forced to modify an old 2006 spreadsheet to use for 2010 because I couldn't find any good ones. I found one that worked well enough, but was not very user friendly, even for an Excel geek like myself. Another, looked great, but failed to function properly.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet in case you would like to follow along with me. Let me know if you find any formula mistakes and I'll take a crack at repairing it. Thanks,
Levi

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CFL Bulbs Don't Come In Green

I've blogged already about how I don't like compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL's). In the blog I questioned whether the bulbs were as "green" as they were being made out to be. I feel like my arguments at the time were pretty good, but I was missing a huge component in my case against the little pig-tailed bulbs. Until now...

Earlier this week, I spotted a headline in the News-Leader that read, "Broken fluorescent bulb cleanup requires caution". It was a 'Dear Heloise' column. If you are not familiar with who Heloise is, then you are probably unfamiliar with reading the newspaper. Heloise, according to her website www.Heloise.com, is America's premier hintologist whose columns appear in over 500 newspapers in both the United States and internationally. I wasn't aware of that before finding her website, so stop making fun of me. I was also previously unaware of the science of hintology.

Bear in mind, that it was my opinion before having read this article that CFL bulbs were worse for the environment than their more traditional incandescent counterparts. But this article really drove the nails into the CFL coffin for me. It reads as follows:

If a compact fluorescent lamp or bulb accidentally breaks, what do you do? The glass is very delicate and can shatter easily if dropped or even handled roughly when being removed from the socket. The bulbs contains a small amount of powdered mercury, so caution is needed for cleanup.
Follow these cleanup guidelines:

Open a window for ventilation for at least 15 minutes before starting cleanup.
Do not handle the pieces with bare hands; wear protective disposable gloves.
Place the pieces in a plastic bag and then into another one, and use duct tape to pick up the tiny fragments.
Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels, and place the towels in the bag, too.
If the area where the bulb broke is carpeted, you can vacuum the carpet, but you must immediately remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister) and put the vacuum bag in with this other bulb trash. Do not vacuum hard floor surfaces.
Check with your trash company or call your recycling center for specific disposal directions. As a general rule, fluorescent bulbs can be put in the trash for pickup or taken to the dump if your state and local regulations allow. Or, check for a recycling center near you.

Let's continue to help the environment and go green!

So, let's condense and review, shall we? A broken CFL bulb is so toxic that we must go to some extreme cleanup measures in order to protect ourselves. A single broken bulb will add to the landfill a pair of disposable gloves, two plastic bags, some duct tape, some paper towels, and possibly a vacuum bag not to mention the mercury that you "cleaned" up. Also, if you must open a window for ventilation for 15 minutes, how much more energy are you using to reheat or recool your home? Also, the CFL bulb is much more complicated than the simple incandescent bulb and uses considerably more energy to produce. Furthermore, the CFL bulbs are not made in America. Patriotism aside, the CFL bulbs require much more energy to be shipped here compared to the American made incandescent bulb.

Make no mistake, CFL bulbs are in no way more green than incandescent bulbs. Rather, their huge Sasquatch carbon footprint and their toxicity make for a very ugly weapon to the environment. The use of CFL bubls remind me of the people who preach to recycle but are so eager to recycle, in fact, that they never reuse anything. The motto goes: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Which means we must first focus on the former and only use the latter as a last resort.

The CFL bulbs claim to use less energy, which may be true but the cost of the energy they use before they are ever installed in your home coupled with the cost of their environmentally toxic impact negate any energy savings they may offer during usage.

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Pizza Delivery Tip #3

Take care of your vehicle and it will take care of you.

I'm sure that you've heard this phrase before. Usually it comes out of the mouth of an older man, but I am getting up there so I almost fit the profile. This advice doesn't come from age so much as it does from experience. A bad one, to be more specific.

I was 18 years old and was driving a car that I really liked. It was a 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais. It was a two-door, five speed manual transmission, 2.5 liter 4 cylinder. It was nice.

It's fatal end came one night when I was delivering a pizza to a subdivision near the intersection of CC and 65 highway. I had taken NN, or "old 65" depending on how long you've been around, and was driving carefully, or so I had thought. The weather had been terrible all night. It was winter and we had been receiving some form of precipitation all day. The sky was sleeting, snowing and dropping freezing rain on us at different times.

I had just passed the Catholic Church when the road ever-so-slightly curves to the left. It's a bend that could easily be taken at 200 miles per hour in dry conditions, but this night was anything but that. I had subscribed to the wisdom that a front-wheel-drive car should have the best tires on the front so that it can get traction. I'm sure some of you have heard this.

When I started to make the curve to the left my back end slid out to the right and before I could react I had already passed the point of recovery. The rear of the car made it's way completely around till I was going backwards. I had tried everything I could think of in those couple seconds repeatedly and nothing was bringing me out of it. The inside of the car started to light up as if the dome light was slowly coming on, but it wasn't the dome light. Still going backwards, I turned to see two headlights headed right for me. I quickly turned back into my seat and braced myself for impact by pushing as hard as I could against the steering wheel with my head pressed into the back of the seat. I even had the foresight to slightly bend my elbows so that I might not break my arms. The moment was no doubt just a second or two, but I remember every detail of it and wondering what was taking so long and that maybe the car had slipped by.

I woke up with the radio blaring. I was cold. I couldn't move much. I couldn't figure out why I was just sitting in my car. I just sat there for a little while. I'm not sure how long. I was staring at my dash near the passenger side and was trying to mentally process what I was seeing, but was having trouble doing so. Finally, I saw that the dash was split wide open. While I was shocked at this observation, I noticed that the instrument panel looked different. I saw the cracks, but there was something else that made it look different. It eluded me for a second, but then I realized that the steering wheel was no longer in the way of me seeing it. Then, it all came rushing to me. I had been in an accident.

The Ford Bronco II that hit me couldn't get the traction to stop. He tried to avoid me, but I was taking up the whole road. I had spun 270 degrees by the time we collided, so the front of his truck hit my car squarely between my driver's door handle and the front bumper. The impact pressed the door so far in that it left me pinned between the door and the console. The steering column broke from the sideways force to the front axle and when it did all the force I had exerted on the steering wheel made me push it through the windshield. The windshield was spider-webbed throughout but there was a hole with the steering wheel still in it. The top part of that hole had two round cutouts where my hands had been when it smashed through it.

Another detail that I'll never forget was the look on the Bronco owner's face when I looked at him. I had not yet realized what was happening when I looked out my driver's door window that no longer was there because my head had gone through it. He was standing out in the middle of the road about 15 feet from me. He was looking the opposite direction of me when I first noticed him. He turned and saw me and didn't come any closer, but asked if I was alright. What I would find out later from him was that he had been trying to wake me up without success for a little bit while he waited on the ambulance to make it to me. He didn't expect me to be awake and looking at him when he turned around.

In the end, the car was totaled, a new pizza was made and sent out to the house but the driver kept the tip for me and gave it to me two days later when I went back to work, my only substantial injury was the piece of glass in the back of my head that they had to dig out, and I had to dig some glass out of my eye when I got home.

This could have all been avoided if I had had better tires on the back.

Moral of Story: Take care of your car or your car might take care of you.

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Pizza Delivery Tip #2

Avoid road rage by hitting it head on.

Along with the many hours of repetitive experience driving to and from the restaurant comes a familiarity with every detail of virtually every possible scenario of the placement of other vehicles on the road and their variable speed of travel. In other words, you become what others may decide is an "aggressive driver", but really you're just a calculating and controlled master of driving efficiency. These calculations may lead you to make driving maneuvers that others find unfair, dangerous, or at the least, impolite.

When I left the restaurant and was turning right (east) out of the parking lot it wasn't uncommon for there to be no one coming. The grassy area between the store and the road left ample room to see if any cars were coming while approaching the road and if none were seen there was no need to come to a full and complete stop before entering the street. After all, it's a parking lot and no stop signs are present to require such a meaningless usage of the brakes.

On one such occasion, I pulled out without stopping and watched a small Mazda pickup start to leave Sonic's parking lot and then abruptly stop upon seeing me coming. As you can see from the satellite image on the right Sonic is located just east of Pizza Hut and by my pulling out without stopping, the driver of the Mazda chose to feel like I had cheated him by pulling out as if it had not been my turn to do so. He began to tailgate me even though I was doing almost five over the limit, so I decided to teach him a lesson. No, I didn't brake check him. That's not safe and it can get people hurt. I slowed to about 10 miles per hour and let him stew for about a minute. Then, I made my turn and took off back to a normal pace.

My turn was to a back roads shortcut to a neighborhood that is only reached otherwise by a slight double-backing of street choices. Few people took the back roads even though it was slightly faster and always less busy. I popped out on McCracken Road about 150 yards ahead of the Mazda who was apparently going the same direction.

I suspect that the driver of the Mazda, after having gone a different route than me, must have started to get the "shoulda" regrets. You know? "I shoulda told that guy..." or "I shoulda taught that guy a lesson by..." Remorse had set in and maybe even some embarrassment received from his friend in the passenger seat, but when my car entered the road in front of him for the second time he wasn't going to let this good fortune pass him by without acting on it. He closed the substantial distance in a matter of seconds and was back to riding my bumper and even more aggressively this time obviously expecting some sort of confrontation. I payed him no mind and continued making my turns toward the customer's house.

I found my destination and after pulling in the driveway the truck stopped across the street. I couldn't let a drama play out in front of the customer so I decided to just deal with these guys first. I remembered my friend, Dustin's, advice about being the first to make a move and therefore controlling the situation so I went for it. I walked fast and purposefully over to the truck and calmly but with some force asked, "You guys have some sort of problem?"

The driver looked like he was debating on whether or not to get out but I made it to his door first and with both hands on the open window frame, I put my face down near his and told him he needed to quit his tailgating, start his truck back up, and leave. While saying this, I smelled the beer on their breath. They appeared to be a couple of construction workers and from what I gathered had probably been drinking most of the day on the job site. The driver started to say something about me not stopping, but I cut him off with, "You better not be here when I come back." With that, I went back to the car and started getting the pizza bag without actually bringing it out of the car. They left.

This situation could have gone much different. So, I, in no way, am advising anyone to use this method. However, it turned out to be great advice to me for the particular confrontation that I had.

In conclusion, realize that efficient, calculated driving can bring about some unwanted rage from time to time. Not everybody appreciates your skill. Maybe, if I had just simply waved an apologetic hand, the entire scenario might have been diffused from the start? In all likelihood, yes.

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Successful Marketing

The other day I was in Walmart picking up a few items. We've almost completely cut Walmart out of our shopping practices, but still go there for certain things like hygiene products and randomly needed items like copy paper. I was picking up some tortilla chips when I spotted this bag of Krunchers. A new flavor!

I immediately said in a very excited, not so quiet voice, "Ooh, I bet these taste good." I would have typed an exclamation point on that quote because the first part of the sentence definitely deserved it, however I started to fade out on "good." I had suddenly become keenly aware that there were three other shoppers in the aisle with me. All of whom, I might add, turned my direction right as I was finishing my sentence. I dared not look anyone in the face, but knew from my peripheral vision that single eyebrows were being raised while simultaneously the eyes just below them were traveling down and back up me looking for other evidence that confirms that I was truly a dork.

You must understand my excitement, though. I'm not a big chip eater. I rarely ever eat them. But, I love Krunchers. Mesquite BBQ, Original, Jalapeno, I don't care. Just give them to me. I also love onions. I put them in almost everything I cook. What a great vegetable!

I don't have any real preference to any Hawaiian flavor that I am aware of, but it sure does sound good for some reason.

I didn't buy the chips. I have my reasons. But, I would like to commend their makers for the wonderfully packaged product that caught my attention and got me so excited that I even embarrassed myself.

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Pizza Delivery Tip #1

Introduction: The other day I remembered a funny story from a long time ago that I thought that I better write down before I forget about it again. And, what better way to help me remember than to write a blog about it so that everyone else in the world can help remember it for me. Upon deciding to write about it, though, I realized that I have a bunch of crazy stories from those days and that it might serve better as a beginning to a short series of blogs in the format of suggestions to pizza delivery drivers. I hope you enjoy them, whether you aspire to the pizza delivery industry or not.

TIP #1 - The way to a pizza eating person's heart (wallet) is through their dog.

In my many years of experience (two) of delivering pizzas, I tried many different tactics to woo my customers into being more and more generous with their gratuities. One of my many profitable tools was memorizing dog's names. See, dogs always come to the door when a guest arrives. Especially when that guest just so happens to be carrying several pounds worth of steamy, cheesy, saucy, meat and vegetables all held together by a crust baked to golden perfection. Immediately, you, the pizza deliverer, become the dog's newest favorite person. Why not capitalize on that new friendship?

Imagine being in the customer's shoes for a second. This should be easy to do. We've all ordered a pizza before, right? Well, now imagine that you love dogs and that you love your dog who you've named Charlotte, but affectionately refer to as Charlie. You ordered a pizza. You expect to pay the driver when he arrives and you even plan on giving a reasonable tip as long as the pizza arrives on time and is in one piece (or eight, get it?). The door bell rings. You open the door. A quick exchange of greetings happen between you and the driver. Your dog runs to the door and stops by your side as the driver unexpectedly says, "Oh, hi there Charlie! How are you tonight? Ready for some pizza?"

Suddenly, a camaraderie takes place as the driver seems more like a friend of the family stopping by rather than some random employee. Time and time again, I watched as the dog's owner would go grab another dollar or two to add to the tip they already had ready and waiting for the average delivery driver.

This tip seemed foolproof. But foolishness has a way of rearing its ugly head despite overwhelming odds against it. Allow me to give an example. I delivered a single pizza to a residence somewhat early in the evening one night at work. A lady probably in her late fifties or so opened the door and out bounded a little gray and white dog I recognized and addressed adoringly by it's name. I, then, looked up to see the lady's face turn quizzical, then maybe a little confused, to somewhat suspicious. I was wondering why she was looking at me like that when it occurred to me that I had never been at this particular house before. So, I started to apologize for having mistook the dog when she interrupted me to ask how it was that I knew her daughter's dog. I was still confused about whether or not the dog was who I thought it was or not. So, I didn't immediately respond.

Finally, I explained that her daughter must order a lot of pizzas or something, but it was clear that my hesitation combined with my lack of a likely story failed to convince her that it was an innocent situation. She had to write the check out still because I had caught her off guard since it hadn't even been twenty minutes from when she had placed her order. So I had to wait there awkwardly for a minute while she explained that she was dog-sitting her daughter's dog while her and her husband were out of town. I couldn't help but notice a slight emphasis on the "husband" part. It all just got really clear to me, suddenly. She thought that I had something inappropriate going on with her daughter. Rather than trying to diffuse the situation I just remained polite, took the check made out for the exact amount (no tip), and left.

I can't imagine that this situation could ever be recreated, but just for safety's sake it might be helpful to not only remember dog's names, but also the home in which you saw them at.

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