Gay or Geek, wait, you're both right.

Like a swarm of locusts, invading some of the Yahoo mailing lists I'm subscribed to are emails generaged by "grouply.com". Grouply professes to help you organize your Yahoo groups into one place. All you need to do is give Grouply your Yahoo signin and password. I haven't looked close enough to see how the site organizes the data.

A good rule of thumb: If a website asks for login information for some other site, then that website shouldn't be trusted.

What Grouply is doing is generating emails, through the user's account, to all of the groups that that user is subscribed to. The emails go out in your name and are superficially indistinguishable from legitimate messages from you. Of course, a small percentage of users also sign up and the emails start all over again.

I frequently receive stupid emails from various sites because someone I spoke to once (and allowed to list me on his buddy list, hello, Yahoo, you need to offer a way to revoke this) keeps giving his login information to different websites and they now have a list of Yahoo members to add to their spam lists.

And, of course, if you use the same password everywhere, well, you're giving already questionable people access to your entire life.

I can think of a small number of trustworthy sites that I might say "Yeah, they're ok" (FaceBook's Friend Finder, MeeBo.com's web based IM client). But at least understanding the risk before giving away the keys is important.

*puts soap box away*

I'm not sure why we notate our dates as Month Day and Year, but it's kinda stupid. The European convention is slightly better: Day Month Year. But not great for sorting, still.

Lets say you have a monthly meeting and for the meeting you create an Agenda in Microsoft Word. Lets say you want to save the Agendas. You might be tempted to name the file "Agenda Feb 08.doc". When you open the folder you'll see all the Agenda's togther, but the way computer's sort, "Agenda Feb 07.doc" will show up before "Agenda Feb 08.doc" instead of "Agenda Jan 08.doc" like you'd probably prefer. If you go back and edit any of the saved agendas, then the time stamp on the file won't help you either.

Solution: use a Year Month (and when necessary) Day notation. "Agenda 2008-02.doc" (or "Agenda200802.doc" cause I hate unnecessary characters). That way the computer can sort the files by name properly.

So, the auditors at one of my clients made a classic computing mistake. Try to make Excel do database work. Nonetheless, they did. They created a spreadsheet I have to use that has 12 columns for each month (12 usually). Of course, the manager decided that we needed a 13th column, because a significant event happened in the middle of March. This is a 13th column for this year only, so, next year we won't need it.

The spreadsheet has a section where it totals up each piece of each month. To add or remove a section, I have to go into those totals and either add or remove the reference to the cell. This is tedious and I'm way oversimplifying the spreadsheet.

I thought, I wish there was an easy way to have excel automatically sum up every 12th column in a range.

"Uh, Dumbass Ray, you keep telling people you're a programmer by profession, fix it!"

So, here it is. A custom function designed to sum the values in regular columns in a range.

Public Function SumOffset(rngSumRange As Range, intOffset As Integer, intStep As Integer) As Variant
    Dim intSteps As Integer
    Dim intX As Integer
    Dim intTotal As Variant
    
    intTotal = 0
    If intStep > rngSumRange.Columns.count Then
        SumOffset = CVErr(xlErrNA)
        Exit Function
    End If

    intSteps = Int(rngSumRange.Columns.count / intStep)
    For intX = 0 To intSteps - 1
        If Not IsNumeric(rngSumRange.Cells(intOffset + intStep * intX).Value) Then
            SumOffset = CVErr(xlErrNum)
            Exit Function
        End If
        intTotal = intTotal + rngSumRange.Cells(intOffset + intStep * intX).Value
    Next
    
    SumOffset = intTotal
End Function

To use the function you put "=sumoffset(range, offset, step)". Where Offset is the column number from the left of the selection where you want to start and step is the number of columns to skip.

Dear fellow net citizens. You may not have figured this out yet, but evite sucks. There are other options, socializr, for example. However, if you don't choose to see the suckiness of evite, I ask of you one thing. Please repeat the details of your event (time, date, address) in the description of the event so that it goes out in the email. Those of us using mobile messaging services will be ever more convenienced for not having to follow three more steps to find this essential information that the idiots, er, developers at evite don't think is important.