kylevarga.com
Online Resume and Thoughts of Kyle Varga
What do I read?
Aug 1st
Many people read books. I try to, but can not seem to get through the entire thing. I often find that books are written with its length in mind. I.E. Before an author starts, they decide they want to write it to 100 pages. This may (and probably isn’t) what actually happens.
However, I prefer to read many shorter articles than a lengthy book.
I used to do this with my bookmarks bar. Being a student, I have a personal laptop and 2 or 3 different computers that I use on a regular basis. I utilized foxmarks (Now xmarks) at the time to keep up with the multitude of sites that I liked to read.
That was, until I started using Google Reader. In my experiences, many people know about Google Reader, but very few have actually used its functionality. Reader allows me to list the sites that I follow, and it will use the RSS Feeds (“Subscriptions”) to bring the latest news from each site in an efficient user interface that even has keyboard shortcuts to be able to browse multiple stories without using the mouse at all.
Currently, I have 44 subscriptions. I will mention that I have it only show me ‘new items’ so I utilize the ‘Starred Items’ to archive the blog posts I may want to read in depth more later, or to send to friends. (Which Google makes simple with the ability to email or Share items from each post.) Since I have 44 subscriptions, I have started utilizing the Folders option which allows me to group related news sources. The following is a list of my Folders and a few of the sites that I highly recommend.
Business
- Inc.com
- Linked 2 Leadership
- Small Business Trends
- You’re The Boss
- Fortune 500 Daily & Breaking Business News
Sports
- Various Alabama and College Football news sites.
Comedy
- Dilbert Daily Strip
- The Daily WTF (Great for programmers)
- xkcd
IT
- ExcelTips Daily Nuggets
- Daily Dose of Excel
- Gizmodo
- The Intelligent Enterprise
- Daring Fireball
- Engadget
- FlowingData
- Gartner: Business Intelligence
- Information Advantage
- Lifehacker (Highly recommend as a daily read)
- Mac Rumors
- Slashdot
- Tech Crunch
News
- Tuscaloosa News
- Crimson White (Alabama Student Newspaper)
- University of Alabama MIS Student Blog
Videos (Actively looking for more to fill this category)
- TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
- Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner
So, no. I could not tell you the last book I read start to finish. Even though I began and skimmed through Clark Howard’s “Get Clark Smart” recently, I find myself with plenty of reading material.
Excel Tip – Number Stored As Text Solution
Jul 12th
Problem:
When using ANY version of Microsoft Excel (2003, 2007, 2010 all exhibit this issue), numbers can be incorrectly saved as “Text”. These cell values will not be included in SUM, PRODUCT, AVERAGE, etc. Excel functions. See Official Microsoft Office – Number Stored as Text Issue for more information.
Current ‘Popular’ Solutions:
- When pasting values, use “Paste Values” to not include previous formatting
- Select each cell and press F2 and enter. Repeat for each cell
- Use VBA/Macro code to go through each cell and correct the issue
- Many other manual and/or technical solutions exist.
As I was researching this issue, I had to put some constraints on my possible solution that did not allow me to use any of the solutions I found. First, I have a very non-technical user, so anything to make their life more complicated (Paste as Special, Error Checker, etc.) was eliminated immediately. I also learned that I would be unable to use any VBA code for compliance reasons. At this point, I had almost given up hope that a solution was possible.
A few days later, I found a solution by using a little-known feature in Excel: Array Formulas.
Welcome
Jun 29th
Welcome to Kyle Varga’s Website. Over the next few days I will be updating and adding content to the site.
Coming soon:
- My Online Resume
- Technical Background and Experience List
- Blog Post – Microsoft Excel’s Number Stored As Text issue and my solution/work-around for a recent project.
For those who don’t know, I am a graduate student at The University of Alabama. I will be receiving my Masters in Enterprise Integration in December 2010. I am currently interning in Atlanta, GA at The Home Depot’s Headquarters working within the IT Supply Chain – Transportation division.