comments on the veep debate

I've been keeping up on the national polling at 538.com. The proprietors of that site as well as most of the mainstream media are liveblogging. I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.

Overall, Sarah Palin didn't do badly. But that's like saying the last Star Wars movie was "better." Joe Biden also didn't do badly. I was hoping for a NASCAR-like wreckage, though. I'm pretty sure that there isn't much that would sway people's minds or hearts toward one way or another.

Hey Jackie, Collette, John, Gary, did you hear that? Your reward is in Heaven!

(Look, I'm LIVE-blogging!)

excel

=IF(AND(D22="left", C22="C"), COUNTIF($F$5:F21, ">0")+1, "")

This has now taken over as the most complex function I've ever written in Excel. It's a baby step in my attempt to learn to program. Eventually, I'd like to be sufficient in Matlab and possibly Python. And though it isn't really that complicated, it took me an hour or so of staring and googling to figure out how to twist Excel functions to do my bidding. Probably would have taken 3 minutes in Matlab or python....