This has been quite a week! I had my annual physical on my birthday yesterday, and I thought I'd get a good report card considering my diet/exercise/weight loss the past six months. However, my doctor thought I looked pale, even considering I'm a pasty white guy and it's January. He expressed a concern about anemia, and said "you know, one of the main causes of anemia in adult males is colon cancer." Great, now he's got me worried about colon cancer! In the meantime, they're doing a blood test and I'm collecting stool samples (yuck). The cold rain all day did not help with my mood as I rushed back to the office. 

At work, we've been informed that there will be no raises for 2009, and a host of other benefits has been cut. The mood around the office is pretty grim at the moment. Maybe things will perk up a little with the inauguration festivities?

When I first qualified for my employer's 401K Plan (actually a Profit-Sharing Plan) back in the 1990s, I set up a little experiment. I allocated 50% of the funds to a money market account, a safe bank account earning a paltry amount of interest, and 50% to the usual stock mutual funds. My peers mocked me at the time, and it was repeatedly suggested to me that I transfer the money market funds into riskier investments. As the experts used to say, when investing for the long-term, stocks make sense. It looked like they were right for awhile. Over time, the mutual funds did well, vastly outstripping the safer half of my account. It went from a a 50-50 distribution to a 60-40 one. But then came the great market crash of 2008.

I received my latest statement yesterday. For the first time in over a decade, the good old money market half of my retirement account is larger than the mutual fund half. In other words, over the past 15 years, certainly a long-term period, a simple bank account has outperformed a portfolio of stocks selected by highly-paid "experts" who have consistently told Americans to invest in the stock market, and to buy bigger and bigger homes and cars. Wrong!
 

1. The "cells", or boxes as I call them, are way too small to see them very well. The sight of a full screen of those tiny boxes hurts my eyes.

2. The cells are too small to fit anything into. Why don't they make the default size of them bigger? Do you ever start a spreadsheet and make the cells smaller? No, you always need to enlarge them.

3. The formulas you can add are not very intuitive. You have to master some kind of mathspeak in order to enter even the most basic formulas. Why can't you write in as a formula: A x B? No, multiplication is *. WTF? They really need to dumb it down more for us liberal arts majors.

4. Most of the time, what people use spreadsheets for can be accomplished in a much easier to read, easier to navigate list in Word. So, why bother to use them at all, except for extreme accounting-type functions?

5. Spreadsheets tend to not print well. For me, the boxes never show up, and the spreadsheet never fits in portrait mode, and sometimes not even in landscape mode. Then what the hell do you do?

6. Worst of all, unlike a list in Word, spreadsheets invite being updated, and becoming a permanent addition to your workload. Half the time, you work to serve the spreadsheet, and to keep it updated and balanced, and the spreadsheet doesn't work for you. In other words, spreadsheets foster pointless busywork that doesn't really need to be done.

I witnessed one of DC's legendary manhole cover explosions today! Fortunately, I wasn't TOO close for comfort, but after seeing it blow, I'm never stepping on one of those again.

It was 2:30, and I stepped out of the office for a quick coffee break. As I approached the intersection of 12th and Pennsylvania Ave NW, I heard and felt an explosion right in the middle of the intersection. The manhole cover flew up, and landed a few feet away, and thick grey smoke with a sickly greenish tint billowed up. The traffic light started blinking red in all directions. Luckily, nobody was hurt, as traffic was light and the intersection was vacant. Two motorcycle cops were there withing a minute, closing off the street.

When I got back to work, a block away, I asked my boss if she heard or felt anything unusual. She said yes, her computer flickered for a second, and she thought she felt something. Yikes! 

The 4th of July was pretty uneventful, except for the unofficial and mostly illegal fireworks displays around the neighborhood. Columbia Heights certainly seems to be ground zero for fireworks launching. On the plus side, they're fun to watch, but the negatives include freaked out pets, and debris left behind for someone else (me?) to clean up.

Earlier in the day, J and I met up with G in Cleveland Park for coffee. G lent us an OK Go CD which we will rip-and-return as soon as possible. It was quiet in Cleveland Park; many of the residents must have been on vacation or at the beach. The little parking lot at the Park & Shop was nearly deserted.

J was off today, but I had to work. The office was quiet, my boss was out, but things should be returning to normal next week.