Thursday, April 08, 2010

JOTD Follow-Up

Last week, I reprinted a suggested approach to understanding President Obama's next speech: Bullshit Bingo. Long-time reader OBloodyHell undertook to automate the creation of Barack Bingo cards, in an Excel (.xls) spreadsheet available here. Download it, unzip it, open the spreadsheet -- you may have to close it and re-open a second time to enable Excel macros (it's safe) -- click the "create" button, and, in under a minute, the program produces your own personalized Obama Speech Squares, such as this:



source: OBH's Obama BS-Bingo generator
* Inherited: as in "I inherited this mess"

Hats off to OBH and -- the next time you must endure a Presidential performance -- enjoy!

4 comments:

suek said...

Hey! The free space belongs in the middle!!

How about making that "I"...that _definitely_ should be a freebie...

OBloodyHell said...

As I designed it, the free space shifts about with all the other entries.

a) That seems more sensible than the middle space alone, which favors the diagonals, since that means you only need 4 in either of them.

b) I seem to recall some bingo working that way, perhaps incorrectly.

BTW, it is possible that you would need to lower your security to run it just because that's the default security setting in Excel. I wasn't going to go to the trouble to certify the macros. I've done that once and it's a pain in the *ahem*, and this isn't something I'm getting paid for.

You can take my word, I don't do anything nefarious with them, or not, as you prefer.

suek said...

I trust you. That doesn't mean I'll download it - but it won't be because I'd anticipate any security problems.

I just don't anticipate listening to any Obama speeches. Pre-digested versions are the most I can tolerate - and even those tempt me to switch channels. Or go bake something. I have a son leaving for Iraq in the next week. No doubt he'll hit me up for cookies - at least he did when he was in Afghanistan. He _said_ it was to help him "win friends and influence people". And then I have a s-i-l still in A'stan. Not for long though. He was smarter than my son - joined the AF National Guard. 3 month rotations instead of 12. He likes peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips. Yech. Oh well. Less tempting than baking something I like.

Thank heavens for KUSC in our area - classical music 24/7. (for when I'm in the car.)

OBloodyHell said...

> I trust you. That doesn't mean I'll download it - but it won't be because I'd anticipate any security problems.

I did it more as a lark than anything else. Excel is a pain in the ass. You can't sort a column or row based on anything discontiguous with the field(s) being sorted, which is ludicrous. It means you have to actually copy a field NEXT to the sort criteria, sort it, and then copy it back to the place where it conceptually belongs. LUDICROUS.

Every time I use an M$ product, I am reminded that the power of monopoly in an IP&SE to control the market is not easily broken. If it were, people would either long-since have abandoned M$ products for the half-assed pieces of garbage they pretty uniformly are, or M$ would have been forced to actually fix things instead of wasting a massive amount of time on almost entirely cosmetic improvements and nothing else. "Ohhh, look, the menus FADE!!" whooop-ti-f'in DOO. Jeez.

:-/ Trust me, if M$ did NOT have monopoly power, things would be orders of magnitude better.