How to Use Excel 2007 and Goal Seek to calculate what the minimum grade you need on a final exam

You need:

• A list of all of your scores on previous assignments/tests (include your final as 0)
• A list of point totals on all of your previous assignments/tests (include your final)
• Excel

Step 1: Sum column A and Sum Column B. My formulas were =SUM(A2:A19) and =SUM(B2:B19)

Step 2: Divide using a formula. My formula was =A20/B20

You should now having something like this:

Step 3: Select the Data Tab. Select What if Analysis, and click Goal Seek

Step 4: Fill in these values and click OK -

“Set Cell”: — this needs to be your divided total from Step 2.
“To value”: — I used .8 because I wanted a B, and that’s what our grading scale uses.
“By changing cell”: — select the final exam score cell that was set as 0.

Step 5: Study accordingly. Good luck!

Personal Budgeting with Mint.com

In January of 2008 I wrote about Mint.com.

I’ve had Mint quietly gathering data for the past 10 months and I’ve come up with a way to intelligently budget for 2009. The only work I’ve done is categorizing the transactions to make this whole exercise worth while.

Step 1: Export all Transactions from Mint into Excel. At the bottom of your “transactions” tab in Mint there’s a small link that says “export all N transactions”

Step 2: Make two additional worksheets. One labeled “Budget” and one labeled “Supplementary Information”. I also edited my initial worksheet to be called “transactions”.

The supplementary information was sort of a scratch pad that fed my “Budget” worksheet.

Step 3: Start calculating your average monthly expenses for relevant categories. For instance, what’s my average phone bill?

=AVERAGEIF(transactions!$F$2:$F$575, "*Phone*", transactions!$D$2:$D$575)

- You need to understand how excel’s averageif works.

- For once a month bills, this is easy… but say you want to know what your average monthly grocery expense. I visit the grocery store many times a month. This adds a layer of complexity.

=AVERAGEIF(transactions!F2:F575, "Groceries", transactions!D2:D575)

That’s my average grocery expense, but not my monthly. We’ll need to implement excel’s COUNTIF function as well.

=COUNTIF(transactions!F2:F575, "Groceries")

The formula for monthly grocery expenses I used is as follows:

((Average Grocery Transaction * Number of Grocery Transactions) / Months of Data Collected)

I also used this method for Restaurants/Fast Food and Wal*Mart visits. I grocery shop at Kroger and do other shopping at Wal*Mart for tracking purposes.

Step 4: Look at your monthly averages, and make up your mind.

I was alarmed at how much money eating at restaurants really costs. It never really gelled for me. I took it a step further and said there are 90 meals a month (breakfast / lunch / dinner – 30 days in a month) and found out my per meal expenditures for groceries and for restaurants. This also showed me another startling number – an average of how many meals a month I was eating at a restaurant.

I made a goal – eat out 5 times a month. This has an added cost of saying, I’ll have to eat groceries more. At a savings of $5 per meal, it’s worth it.

Pet Peeve: Bug No. 4958372

Symptoms: Referring to a blog post as a blog. e.g., “In this blog I will show you” or “In my earlier blog titled N”

Affected: People new to blogging, particularly users over 30.

Fix: Call it a freaking POST. Blogs are made of posts.

Style Points in Paramore – Misery Business

I imagine the conversation in the recording studio went down like this:

PRODUCER: The song is hot, but the chorus is really lagging behind. You need to spice it up.

PARAMORE (to her band): Um, GUYS!!! Let’s go!

GUITAR PLAYER IN HER BAND: Oh, I’ve got it. We’ll keep playing the exact same notes, but just change the notes from a legato technique to something much more staccato.

PARAMORE: OK!

PRODUCER: BRILLIANT!

Take a listen for yourself:

Cheap, but effective.

More entries like this on my music tag.

There needs to be a new TLD – Dot S (.s)

Think of the domain names:

• feathersnot.s
• dippin.s
• connect-the.s
• polka.s

Work can be fun sometimes.

(2:28:13 PM) CW: Connection verification failed for data source: Login fails.
(2:28:16 PM) Andy H: k
(2:28:18 PM) Andy H: one moment plz
(2:28:22 PM) Andy H: your call is important to us
(2:28:26 PM) Andy H: *lame music*
(2:28:27 PM) CW: /taps foot
(2:28:52 PM) Andy H: try now
(2:29:08 PM) CW: worked.
(2:29:14 PM) CW: thank you sir.
(2:29:20 PM) Andy H: thank you sir. is there anything else i can assist with this afternoon?
(2:29:31 PM) Andy H: would you like to take a brief survey regarding the support you just received?
(2:29:47 PM) CW: no. you have answered all my question adequately. thank you for you assistance.
(2:29:56 PM) CW: click

The Dark Tower

At the beginning of 2008 I mentioned starting Stephen King’s Magnum Opus The Dark Tower.

Sometime in January I finished it. Lee’s comment about not reading past a certain part was definitely good advice.

Great series. I hope that someone from my generation produces something this mind blowing.

Oh, and I’ve got my own Roland poster (thanks to my sister!):

2007 Billboard #1s were 3% Introduction

I’ve been doing WAY too much thinking about the Intro music analysis.

With Last.FM and Youtube, I got the numbers for the 2007 Hot 100 Number-One Hits

(click for full image)

2007′s average introduction length was 3%.

Notable information:

• Average song length was 4 minutes and 25 seconds
• Kanye West – Stronger had a negative introduction
• Maroon 5 – Makes me Wonder had the longest intro

I’ll be running several more years. My prediction: this experiment will show society’s attention span has gone way down, and further prove that popular music sucks. =)

Metallica’s And Justice for All Album: 21% Intro

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of an intro in popular music. Do long, non-vocals introductions work? Are they common?

An intro time is the number of seconds of music played before vocals enter the song.

The Intro Ratio™ is the number of seconds of an intro divided by the songs total number of seconds.

There are cases when this ratio can be negative. Think songs starting out A-Capella. Instrumental songs need not apply.

Since the thoughts were originally spawned by Metallica’s unnecessarily long intro to “King Nothing”, I thought I’d analyze a Metallica album.

An instrumental song, “To Live Is To Die” was omitted.