Look ma! No hands on the keyboard!
Posted on August 31, 2006
Filed Under Life | 12 Comments
Once again, I’m the break-apart woman. A few months ago, my shoulder started hurting. I thought I was just sleeping funny. Eventually, the pain got worse and now I’ve lost some mobility in the arm. I can’t touch the middle of my back, and I can’t raise my arm straight in the air. I am also experiencing weakness in what was once my dominant hand. I know. I know. I should have dealt with it sooner. But I kept thinking that if I took it easy it would fix itself. From my Googling, it’s a very likely that I have a rotator cuff tear. Since it’s my left shoulder and I’m left handed and I don’t remember injuring myself, I’m sure it’s a repetitive stress injury from spending a lot of time with my hand on a mouse.
I was hoping that the week away would help in which case I would come back and make sure that my desk was more ergonomic. But it didn’t help. If anything the pain is worse, and I’m not sleeping well.
So this week I finally went to the doctor. That’s a whole other story in itself. I made the mistake of going to a general doctor first, even though my insurance doesn’t require it. I was hoping to get an initial assessment and get the MRI ordered so I knew where to go for treatment. Unfortunately, my regular doctor is on vacation so I had to see his partner. The guy starts prescribing pills for me even though I told him that I have a stomach condition that makes it difficult for me to take anti-inflammatory medication. Suffice to say we did not hit it off. He ordered the x-ray, (which shows minor arthritis… not really the cause of the problem considering the fact that I’m only 40 years old and minor arthritis wouldn’t cause the lack of mobility that I have) and insisted that my insurance company wouldn’t pay for an MRI until after I’ve had treatment. Sure that makes sense. Aetna wants to pay for treatment with no diagnosis. Yesterday, he called to see how I was doing. I asked again for the MRI since that appears to be standard operating procedure for this kind of injury. We argued. I hung up on him. Then I did what I should have done in the first place and I have an appointment with an orthopedist next week. Times have changed from the days that I would blindly do what a doctor told me to do. He can write all the prescriptions he wants, it is still my decision whether or not to fill them. Believe me, I’m not looking for surgery. I’m hoping I can fix the problem with either cortisone or physical therapy. If I do go on medication for this, I’d want to know that it’s something that will work on the specific problem that I have so it’s worth messing with my tummy.
In the meantime, I’m trying to minimize my mousing time. Goodness forbid I actually take more time off, so I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, which is voice recognition software. David Pogue had wrist problems and has sworn by this program for years. Verdict? It’s interesting. I’m getting much better at it. I didn’t get near the accuracy that Pogue did, but I am finding the more I’m correcting (and I’m correcting a lot) the more accurate this is getting. I’m learning to think ahead about what I want to say and I’m working on minimizing any extra vocal sounds when I talk. I’m a very fast typist, so it’s slow going. Some of the mistakes it makes are hysterical, so I’m being very careful about my proofreading on e-mails. This very blog entry was done without my hands ever touching the keyboard or mouse. Even though you can control everything about the computer with your voice, it would be very difficult to rely on voice commands exclusively. Still, I’m glad I bought this, as it’s cutting my mousing and keyboard time in half. It’s amazing how much harder it is to think through your mouth as compared to thinking through your fingers. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to buy the software for both Mac and PC and I’ve heard that the Mac version is not as good. So when I have to work on the Mac I rearranged my desk to get better position on the mouse. I’m also experimenting with using my right hand for mousing, but that won’t help me if I injure that shoulder too.
tags: NaturallySpeaking, rotator+cuff+injury, voice+recognition, David+Pogue
Back home again
Posted on August 26, 2006
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We had a great vacation in Disneyworld this week. Today is all about laundry and catching up. It was brutally hot in Florida, but thankfully no sunburns or major injuries. Just a lot of sore feet.
Disney has a new way of dealing with the pictures their photographers take all over the parks. They used to give you little pieces of paper that you had to take to the photo store in the park to review/purchase photos. Now you get a little card with a bar code on it when you pose for the first picture. The photographers scan the card each time, and you can review/purchase your entire trip’s pictures at one time, instead of when you leave each park. No little pieces of paper to keep track of. You can also look at the pictures online, and share them with others (who are welcome to purchase prints at $12.95 each, of course). No right-clicking (to discourage downloading the images without actually buying them). Eric has about 300 pictures on his camera to upload later.
In the meantime, here’s one that I grabbed with my camera phone when Eric wasn’t around to take the shot (I didn’t bring my bulky digital camera).
This was outside our room window after a storm. Beautiful rainbow. We stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge…at any given time you could see giraffe, zebras, elands and other animals right outside the window.
The difference in the crowds compared to our previous February trips was amazing. We rarely waited more than 20 minutes for anything. The longest waits were for our luggage at the airport. What is it with AirTran? I had a ridiculously long wait for my luggage when I took a business trip to Boston last month (45 minutes), and the same now in both Orlando and Philadelphia.
Vonage scheduled personal greetings…who knew?
Posted on August 19, 2006
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Ever since I’ve been working as an employee for a company, but out of my home, I’ve had a challenge with my voice mail outgoing message. If I record something personal, “Hi, you’ve reached the Sohn residence…” then I get callers who are confused because they were calling the Director of Operations and Communications of C3 and their message will usually start with something like, “I’m trying to reach Judi Sohn…I thought I had her work number but I guess this is her home number…” If I record something professional, I get school teachers asking me for our home number. So I left a greeting that was kind of in the middle.
I had no idea that Vonage has scheduled personal greetings!
Was that option always there? We’ve been Vonage customers for over 2 years and I had no idea.
I was able to record one greeting that was personal, “…you’ve reached the Sohn residence…” and another that was business. Then I set the personal one to work all day Saturday & Sunday and 6 pm - 9 am Monday through Friday, and the business one to be 9 am-6 pm Monday through Friday. There will still be some confusion, but this should help a lot.
Off to worship at the feet of the mouse
Posted on August 19, 2006
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Tomorrow we’re off for our first family vacation since February 2004. As members of the Disney Vacation Club since 2001, we’re off to visit the mother ship. This will be the girls’ 4th visit (previously 2000, 2002 and 2004) and our first during the summer. The other three trips were in February. I’ve been to Disney World in late August before, I know it will be hot. But I also know that the lines will be considerably shorter. And I don’t remember the February weather being all that great. If anything, it was cold and dreary…and very, very crowded. I have memories of going in August and waiting in lines for under 5 minutes for most attractions. I don’t know if it will be that good…but it should be much better than in February.
Because we’re traveling in a “value” season, we had enough points to stay in a Savannah-view room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. This morning, I made reservations for two character breakfasts (at MGM and Animal Kingdom), two evenings for the kids at Simba’s Clubhouse (the resort’s childcare center), and 4 dinners (two with the kids at Jiko and Tony’s, two without the kids at San Angel Inn and Wolfgang Puck). Believe it or not, the girls were the ones who begged for at least one evening at the childcare center. They have dinner, play video games and board games and watch movies. My kids’ idea of paradise and they’ll be able to chill out after busy days. That will allow Eric and I have to have one evening of adult fun at Downtown Disney/Pleasure Island and one evening to hit Epcot and attractions the girls aren’t interested in. I had no problem getting the reservations I wanted. I remember having a bit of a challenge for our February trips, even calling weeks in advance. We learned a long time ago that you don’t plan to have any kind of waitress service at a Disney restaurant without an advanced reservation…and you don’t do this trip at all with children without having a bit of a game plan going in.
Only bummer is that the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game at MGM is closing for good tonight. We liked that one.
This is the first time that I will be away from C3 for more than a couple of days since I started in August 2005. I’m not bringing my laptop. I will have my phone and I can read email, but I promised that I would limit it to a couple of minutes a day and I would only respond to emails that would involve someone having to call 911 if I didn’t. They’ll be fine without me, I’m sure. Our new Executive Director starts on Monday.
tags: Disney, vacation, Magic+Kingdom, travel
Case-sensitive vlookups for Salesforce in Excel 2003
Posted on August 17, 2006
Filed Under Nonprofit | 1 Comment
I spent the last 3 hours trying to figure this out. Finally a post on the Salesforce Community forum nailed it, so here it is for my future reference and Google posterity.
Okay, some quick background…in Salesforce, every record, whether it be a donation, contact, account, connection, etc. is identified by a unique 18 character code. For example, a donation by “John and Mary Smith” may have a Donation ID of 00630000007mxP4, while Mary Smith has a Contact ID of 0033000000Kx664.
These codes are the record’s fingerprint and you can do a lot of neat stuff with your data in the background in Salesforce as long as you have that number. Namely, you can link unrelated spreadsheets together in Excel, using a simple “vlookup” formula. For example, let’s say you have a spreadsheet with a list of people that you want to import into Salesforce. It’s just first name, last name, email address, etc. You don’t want to import that list into Salesforce until you confirm whether or not they are already in there to avoid creating duplicates. If there are 100s of names, you also don’t want to check each one by hand in Salesforce….slllloooowww. Using an external data loader (I like DemandTools, personally), you can quickly export a table that contains all the existing Contact IDs along with the corresponding email address or other data that you can match up against the existing list you have. Create a blank column in the new spreadsheet and in a cell enter:
=vlookup(#,contactIDs!colA:colB,2,false)
where # is the cell that contains the email address and contactIDs!colA:colB represents the lookup range in the big contact list (let’s say the email address in ColA and the Contact ID in ColB). The “2″ is the column the formula should return as the result. So if I wanted to return a result that was in column C instead of Column B, I would say #,contactIDs!colA:colC,3,false instead.
I have been using this happily for a few weeks now, but tonight I ran into a problem. I found out the hard way that these Salesforce numbers are case sensitive. I have a donation that has an ID of 00630000007mxRY and a donation with an ID of 00630000007MxRY and while Salesforce knows they’re different, Excel thinks they’re the same and it completely skewed-up my report.
I found this page on Microsoft’s site. But it doesn’t work…after it finds that there’s an issue with case sensitivity in the lookup, it returns “no match” and not the actual result. Yeah, thanks Microsoft. I know that it’s not a match…keep looking and find the match!
Finally found the answer right here…
The trick is to turn the case-sensitive ID into a non-sensitive one by adding some additional numbers at the end. The ID with a Mx will get a different set of numbers at the end than the one with MX.
Create a blank column in both spreadsheets and use this formula:
=#&CODE(MID(#,12,1))&CODE(MID(#,13,1))
&CODE(MID(#,14,1))&CODE(MID(#,15,1))
where # is the cell that contains the ID number.
Then, do the vlookup formula on this new cell as before and voila! No more issue with x and X being treated like the same thing in Excel.
