An Explanation:

The other day I downloaded a database table, with a ridiculous number of columns, as a CSV spreadsheet. I wanted to write a program to isolate and clean up a couple of its columns. To do this I needed to know the column numbers. For example, that "About Me" is the 78th column. When I opened up the spreadsheet in LibreOffice I didn't find the column number. Instead, the columns had names like "AG" and "BN". I get why it makes sense to use numbers for rows and letters for columns, but I can't easily tell a program to get the AOth element of an array.

I did a web search to see if someone had a nice converter online that would tell me which number to use for the column names, but my search turned up nothing. I hope to correct that for future searchers of the internet. Enjoy.

P.S. - This converter is also handy if you want to know the position of various letters in the alphabet. Just replace the word "column" with the word "letter".

I was a young teen when my mom asked me to help her in the nursery. My assignment was to hold a baby girl while she slept with a pacifier in her mouth. As a teenage boy, I had little experience with handling infants. All I remembered was being told many times to be very gentle around them. I assumed they must be easily breakable, and so I sat very still as she slept in my arms.

After about fifteen minutes, she stirred and the pacifier popped out of her lips. I knew that pacifiers kept babies asleep, so I reached up and pushed it back into her mouth. A moment later she spat up all over herself and the pacifier. I was horrified. I explained my predicament to my mother and the baby was sent back to her mother, but that was enough to convince myself that I would never be able to manage a baby. I didn't even know what I had done wrong. Did the pacifier make her spit up? Had I made her sick somehow? Babies were simply too complicated.

The experience has been brought back to my memory as I hold a different infant girl in my arm, and as she spits up at least a few times every day when I'm holding her. Yet, she doesn't appear to be broken. In fact, her normal reaction is just to smile and continue sleeping. Maybe I can manage a baby.

You're probably sitting at home wondering how you should invest your excess capital to increase your personal wealth in the uncertain days that lie ahead. Fortunately for you, I have the information you need to make your current massive stockpile of money even larger.

The key is to anticipate changes in the market and move money from dwindling markets into ones that are going to grow rapidly. There have been plenty of disruptive innovations over the past century, and those who have correctly foreseen their consequences have reaped the rewards. Today we're going to take a look at one change that will have a tremendous ripple effect: the autonomous vehicle.

Now, the core software and hardware are already spoken for, but you don't need to invent the iPhone to make a killing on iPhone cases. Let's look at a few markets that will open up when autonomous vehicles become common.

1. Hotel on Wheels - This is for those of you with very deep pockets. You'll need an agreement with a company with working autonomous driving hardware and a fleet of recreational vehicles. From there, the main problem is counting all your money. Customers spend a day sightseeing in a city of their choice, and spend the night in one of your traveling hotel rooms. When they awake, after a fitful night's sleep, they are in another tourist destination up to four hundred miles away. Naturally, you'll need to tune your autonomous vehicles so that they accelerate and decelerate smoothly. Providing room service is left as an exercise for the reader.
2. Carports - As fewer people chose to own motor vehicles, the demand for carports will skyrocket. After all, who wants to have to walk through pouring rain to get to a robot taxi? The cost on this one is quite reasonable. You'll only need metal roofing and some pillars. Since your customers are no longer paying to maintain their own cars, they'll have plenty of money to pay for the convenience your carport provides.
3. Garage Door Openers - Most homes have garages, but what good is a garage when you don't own a car? Consider it a built-in, mildly climate-controlled, carport. How do you let the robot taxi inside your garage? Waiting for the car to pull up and then opening the garage door will get tiresome. Plus, you'll have to take your garage door opener with you to open the door to let yourself back in. You could leave your garage door open permanently, but since most people keep valuable possessions inside their garages, this option will be unpopular. The answer is to allow robot taxis open your garage door when needed. The capital expensive for this option is moderate. You'll need a website, some encryption experts, and a manufacturer for programmable garage doors and openers. When your customer calls for a ride, a one-time-use code will be sent to the eligible car, allowing it to open your garage (and close it again if you're not already waiting). When you're ready to head home, another code will be generated and used the same way.

So, sit back and enjoy your new-found prosperity. The future is going to be very profitable. Unless your job in any way depends on driving a vehicle or serving people that drive them. In that case, you're probably going to want to give serious consideration to what you're doing with your life.

Last week I read a very interesting article. I know you probably don't have the time or inclination to read it, so here's a quick summary: A young man from Denver, Colorado was arrested and jailed for armed robbery. After ten years in prison, he comes home a changed man. He starts a family, finds a good job, and becomes involved in his community. After five years of freedom, he is told that his release was a mistake, and he is re-arrested and carried back to prison, where he is to remain for at least the next forty years.

The article raises many interesting questions for me. It highlights the dangers of overly broad applications of existing laws. It shows how handing out punishment without discretion can be good politics but cause terrible pain. It begs the question of whether harsh sentencing actually creates worse criminals. Would it be better to give shorter sentences, or at least early parole possibilities to younger offenders, so that they can have the chance to use their prison time to prepare for a better life? Could showing grace to criminals cause some of them to change their ways? However, one thing has really haunted me.

At the very end of the article the imprisoned man is being interviewed at the jail. He says that the reason why he's back in prison is because he failed God while on the outside. He gives a few examples, which include coaching a soccer team some Sundays instead of attending church services, not praying often enough, and not studying the Bible regularly. I feel for him. For most of my life I viewed every setback as a sign that I was failing God in some way. It was easy enough, whenever things went wrong in my life, to find an instance of my own moral failings in the not-so-distant past.

Over the past few years, though, I've begun to question that viewpoint. It's not that I think sin doesn't matter. Rather, I think sin is its own punishment. I hope that someone in that prison can tell this man that cutting him off from his family and community is not God's method of encouraging greater faithfulness. The fact is that we live in a broken and decaying world, filled with the fruit of mankind's evil. Bad things happen to the faithful. Sometimes, it seems like they suffer more.

If suffering from evil deepen our relationship with the one who rescued us, that is a wonderful thing, but we shouldn't think that was the intention. We have an enemy who wants to destroy us, mind, body, and soul, and we have a savior who wants to restore his entire creation. Sometimes we make progress toward that goal, and manifest his kingdom on earth. Other times the world attacks and destroys something beautiful. Either way, we press on, not because we fear God's whip on our backs, but because we long for the day when all the world will see him face to face.

Balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing is just another name for Worchestershire sauce.

It was sometime in early 2012 when one of the teenagers we knew revealed his plan to host a murder mystery dinner. He had bought a used murder mystery kit for a dollar, and wanted to use it to raise money for an upcoming trip to the Dominican Republic.

"Those are horrible," I told him. Kelly, who had experienced boxed murder mysteries before, agreed. "Well, it's what I have," he told me. My annoying urge for excellence jumped into the conversation. "I'll write a real mystery for you."

I decided to write something that would draw an audience, generate some repeat performances, and maybe raise a few bucks for the trip. All murder mysteries need a victim, but I didn't want some nondescript character that no one would care about. I needed someone whose death would add to the drama. A quick search for names that garnered a lot of attention in the likely audience turned up a result, and thus I decided to plot the murder of Glenn Beck.

Writing the first draft of the script took only a few days. I had a couple of friends proofread it, then did a bit of rewriting based on their inputs. Since it was supposed to be for a murder mystery dinner, I wrote four acts, so that a meal could be served between scenes. By the end of the third scene, the audience would have all the information required to determine the identity of the killer, and (while eating their desserts) could fill out a card naming the person they believed to be the culprit.

I presented the script to our young friend, and he set out to line up actors from his circle of acquaintances. Sadly, that proved harder than he had imagined, and eventually he announced that the play was canceled. The Murder of Glenn Beck was covered up.

A year later one of the original actresses remembered my script and asked if she could perform it as the finale of her acting class. I was delighted to know the script might finally get a performance and lent it to her at once. Unfortunately, the playhouse vetoed its performance, not because of its controversial main character, but because it involved a murder. The Murder was covered up a second time.

Two more years have passed, and by now the play has become quite dated. Its references hearken back to a different age, but I still find some elements of it quite delightful. Rather than leave it to languish in my directory of past writings, I decided to dust it off and present it for your amusement. The truth of the Murder of Glenn Beck must be known.

What is the sickness that inspires us to divide the world into Christian and non-Christian? Why do followers of Jesus think that hanging out with non-Christians is either backsliding or missions work? Why do we ask questions like "How do I love someone without condoning their lifestyle?"

Did Jesus want his followers to provide one more cultural division? Did he intend for us to literally and figuratively put up walls to keep out the world?

Why would I ask six questions in a row? Why does one of the questions quote another question? Is anyone still reading this?

I know Paul says that the message of the cross is an offense, but when I read the accounts of the apostles, the people offended were the powerful and the religious. A local radio station is running a series about how to share the gospel without ruining our relationships, as though somehow those two were related. It's only because we've spent so long believing that "sharing the gospel" is code for "preaching at people until they hate you" that we worry so much.

The world has enough people preaching at them from atop high horses. Maybe we should try sharing the gospel in a new way.

No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids.

— President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address

I've heard, more than once, someone refer to the Bible as "God's love letter". I confess that I haven't received that many love letters in my life, but not one of them included accounts of war, a detailed architectural layout, or scathing denunciations of foreign governments. My question is, what sort of love letters are these people receiving?

If this is what their love letters tend to contain, I can understand why they're having so little luck at impacting the world for good.

The day finally arrived. Our house guest has found herself a new place to live. To say she has "moved out" may be a bit of an overstatement, as many boxes of her things still remain in our library. Still, she is spending her nights at her new house, and has returned one of the keys we gave her.

We've started the process of restoring our house to its previous state, and taking inventory of the things that appear to have left along with our guest. Kelly has been passing along her findings to our guest so that they can be returned to us.

I suppose all of this demands a summary, so that my future self can check here if memory fails. Overall, I think I would gladly allow another displaced person to reside here for a while. In fact, we've still got a few of those offers open at the moment.

What I would do differently, however, is to restrict future guests more strictly at first. Allowing someone free access to the house has proven to be very stressful for Kelly, as her plans around the house often end up being the victim. Setting boundaries may help to ensure that Kelly doesn't end up completely frustrated at the end.