Monthly Archives: September 2009

Prepositions are some of the shortest words in the English language, but they are also some of the most powerful. Swap out a few letters and you can change the whole meaning of the sentence.

For example, a popular song that has been going through my head lately, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” can be changed dramatically by swapping “to”, “at” and “of”. Consider these variations:

Take me out to the ballgame

Take me out at the ballgame

Take me out of the ballgame

You could also use “from” or “in” but they would have similar meaning to the three above. Are there are any other prepositions that would totally change the meaning?

Your turn. Can you think of other sentences that can be radically changed by changing a preposition?

When you are feeling down try looking up. If you are as far down as you think you are, everything worth seeing is in that direction. If not, you may just see a big blue sky. If the blue sky does not cheer you up, maybe lightning will strike and an idea blaze across your benighted mind giving it a bluish hue.

Maybe that is why the best ideas just come to you out of the blue?

Whatever you do, don’t let yourself get down in the mouth. Talk about ruffled feathers!

Who is the most famous person you have never heard of?

You don’t know? Neither do I. Kinda hard to tell until you find out about a new famous person and then they don’t qualify.

Until today I had never heard of Burt Bacharach, but I understand that he was quite famous. He wrote a lot of very famous songs that I am pretty sure I have heard, but I am not sure. I don’t do titles. I did recognize “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”. He was most famous in the 50′s through 70′s, when I was not listening to the radio much. That might be why I had not heard of him, but I have heard of many others from his generation.

How is it that someone could be soo famous and still be so obscure? It probably has to do with the fact that there are millions of famous people and some are bound to get lost in the crowd.

I wonder who the top 100 most famous people in all of history are, and what percentage of the world population has heard of each. I also wonder how much that list changes from year to year.

Phillip and I talked about two motivations for respect: love and fear. While talking about fear I asked him what could happen if a little guy as tall as his knee was yelling at him and saying all kinds of mean things. What should he be afraid of?

Phillip replied, “He should be afraid because I could kick him across the world.”

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It is time once again for a little edufication over at the Middle Zone. This month Robert Hruzek challenged us to learn to laugh. The rules this time allow us to link back to older posts. Since this blog is full of laughs, I decided to give you a list of a few of the best recent ones.

Classic Re-post: The Future is Obsolete!

Simple, Silly, Sturdy… Shreaded

Women are Normal

New from Google: Google Currency

The Obama Nation Logo

Violence in Spreadsheet Execution

Diploma is a dead-end street

How to Keep a Bored Blog Reader Entertained

I was about to thank Allen Browne over at PC Review for his excellent solution, when I discovered that I had to sign-up for yet another online account in order to comment there.

Oh well, it is easier to post on my own blog anyway.

So here is how it works.

You import your data manually and just before finishing go into advanced mode and save your import specification. Then the next time you want to repeat the import use the DoCmd.TransferText method and reference your saved import specification.

Yep, it’s that easy!

Image via Wikipedia

I am so excited! I have been working on this project for several months now. The whole time I have been working exclusively on the back end, which is 95% of this project, but I have basically been working blind.

Saturday, I finally got to see the results of all this coming together. I still have some work to do on it, but it is so exciting to see something, anything, good come out after this much work.

I got so excited in the final push I forgot I had a blog and went five days without posting. Did anyone notice? I guess my three year trend of posting every day has been well broken, but I learned a lot from the disipline of daily posting. More on that later. I will probably mix it up a bit from here on out.

For now, I am back to work. Anything exciteing happening in your life?