Alright ladies and gentlemen.

As a pure exercise of letters from the past, let me tell you about something that I encountered yesterday.  One was a first, the other one was an ongoing irritant.  In an effort to make your experience here as interactive as possible, I’ll let you decide which is which.

First of all, open up Microsoft Excel.

Open it!

If you don’t have Microsoft Excel on your computer, just sit there in your smug sanctimony for a few minutes before I move on to item number two.

Got Excel open?

Good.

Pick a cell, any cell.  Don’t let me see it.

Type in the following number and hit ‘enter’:

12345E108

What did it do?

I’ll tell you what it did.  Excel automatically converted that number to display it in what I affectionately call “psychotic mathspeak”.   You’re probably seeing something like 1.23E+112 in the cell where you entered that number.

If you don’t want the number to be displayed in psychotic mathspeak, you have to format the cell to text and then re-enter it.

Certainly it’s a relatively inconsequential event in your life.  It’s not like you always have to type a similar number in Excel.  If you know how to fix it, things can’t really be that bad, can they?

I deal with that phenomenon approximately 2-3 times a week.

Now that you’re sufficiently baffled as to why I would need to enter data like that into Excel on a regular basis, let’s talk about the future.

Take a look at this video.  As I understand it, Microsoft has produced this thing as a peek-a-boo into the very near future.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0]

Did you watch it?

Kinda cool, don’t you think?

Let’s set aside the fact that I have no respect for a Windows phone at this point.  I have no experience using them, but I have and do use Windows.

Ladies and gentlemen, please understand this.  Until the day comes where I can enter a 9 digit number that has “E1” in the middle of it without Excel getting all smart ass Autocorrect on me by changing it to psychotic mathspeak which I haven’t used since my college days, I have a hard time believing that the fruits of Cabeza del Gates is successfully going to deliver the blue pill born, Matrix like world portrayed in this video.

Just sayin’.