Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 2009 Issue June 30, 2009 Keeping Track of Everything in Your Life Books, DVDs, recipes, birds we’ve seen, and our family trees. My wife and I maintain all sorts of lists and databases to organize our lives. For some lists, a simple spreadsheet or “flat file” database suffices. In other cases, you need a complex “relational” database that can perform all kinds of magic. Choosing the right tool for the task is based on your needs. Using Spreadsheets for Lists A spreadsheet is similar to a columnar book, featuring a giant table into which you can enter text or numeric data. Modern spreadsheets are very good at managing lists and basic tables of data. However, there are limits. For example, the version of Microsoft Excel I use can only store 65,535 rows of data and each row is limited to 256 columns. More importantly, Excel seems to dislike more than 100,000 “populated” cells of data. Though originally developed to analyze numeric data,...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 2009 Issue May 30, 2009 Font Fanatic: Putting the Best Face Forward How words look on a page or screen can be as important as what they state. Consider corporate logos and signs you see around town. The lettering conveys everything from how “serious” the message is to associations with specific eras. Personally, I love the clean precision of Art Deco lettering, which brings to mind elegance, the Roaring 20s, and a young Hollywood. However, no matter how much I might like Art Deco, I would not prepare a business letter using the typefaces Broadway, Plaza, or Desdemona. These might look great on Agatha Christie or F. Scott Fitzgerald novel covers, but they are inappropriate for a letter to my university department chair. Having a few hundred fonts installed on your computer does not mean you should try to use them all, especially within the same document. I’ve seen the results of font addiction and they aren’t attractive. I admit to being...