Relics of the IT underworld

Okay time to reach deep down and pull out a miracle. Have you ever wanted to format some text in an excel document? Well with that said anybody who has tried knows that it isn't an easy task. That is unless you happen to do a little VBA code in the background. The problem with Excel, and it's not so much a problem as it is designed that way, is that it doesn't offer much when you need to modify something with a letter or non numeric value in it. This requires you to write some code to perform some good old fashioned string parsing. For those of you who have never worked with VBA don't worry it doesn't bite, it is actually very simple. All of the functions to read, write, and look through your string are built into VBA. With that said let's fire up excel and head into town. The example I am going to demonstrate here is based off of a simple string needing to be turned into a MAC address like format. In this case I like the CISCO xxxx.xxxx.xxxx format since that...

As I work from day to day in my shiny Windows 7 operating system I simply think to myself "Self...How did I ever get along without some of these features for so long". However, looking around you will find people buying laptops and having them reloaded with Windows XP. Participating in this ritual of reloading is like taking part in a badly written movie. You know the one where it starts out with unbelievably bad opening credits to the muscular dude hitting on the chick....only goes downhill from there. Each laptop I get is like receiving a basket labeled Humpty Dumpty. Some of these machines take hours to piece together all of the drivers the computer manufactures swear won't work with XP. Trust me don't try calling either because they have the line down to a science about we don't support that operating system and if you would like to install the original one they would be more than happy to help you or worse yet that unit is out of warranty. I had the pleasure ...