Monday, February 25, 2008

Waiting on IO

I am stuck at work waiting on input/output operations to complete. I might as well explain how I created the, now infamous, graph of failure. And by explain I mean to explain the technical details of creating a graph, not explain the sordid details of how to gain 25 pounds of hideous gellatenous fat in 3 months. If you need to know how to gain fat rapidly, please see some other blog for help, southern cuisine might be a good topic to search on.
  1. First get your data in a spread sheet program, title the first column date, second column weight.
  2. Now enter your start date 1/1/2007 for example in the cell under date column
  3. Now click the little box in the bottom right corner of the 1/1/2007 cell and drag the mouse (move the mouse while holding the button) down the screen to create the days of the calendar. Don't worry you do not need to know your weight on every day to make a graph, you could start with just two weight values months apart and the graph will create a trend line between them for the missing measurements.
  4. Now go back to the top and start entering in weight measurements for the dates you have on record. So if you weighed on 1/30/2007 go to that row and put in the weight value next to that date.
  5. SAVE IT NOW! You entered a bunch of data, if something goes wrong you can begin from here and not have to redo the tedious data entry American businesses outsource.
  6. Once complete with entering in your weight values for the dates you have weighed yourself in the past, click the column headers to highlight the entire two columns with the dates and weights.
  7. Now click to insert a chart, the command might be under Insert | Object | Chart or their might be a little pie chart icon to click on the toolbar.
  8. Chose XY Plot | Lines only | data in columns | first column label. Every spreadsheet software is different, you want to plot the data as a line graph using the data in columns and the first column as x-axis data, second column y-axis data.
  9. Usually you can label the y-axis (the vertical axis) of the graph something like weight(lbs), I don't label the x-axis (horizontal axis) since dates are pretty obvious on their own.
  10. Give the graph a title and you can finish the chart wizard. Use shift+click to drag the chart size larger without changing the aspect ratio (legth/width proportion) of the chart.
  11. Begin crying because you are a fat ass then post on blog while listening to something emo or petting a cat. Or I guess rejoice if you lost weight, and then bite me because it was probably just retained water and muscle.

3 comments:

Christina said...

LOL! I can't stop laughing! You totally crack me up.

I'm going to do a search on southern cuisine and NOT DO anything they suggest.

Anonymous said...

You are a funny, funny guy. Thanks though for posting this. So far I have been anti weigh-in because I get obsessive and let the numbers control my emotions. So this time around I have taken pictures and taken more notice in my clothes fitting and whatnot. But it is time I go and buy a new scale and get on it- the graph will be a good marker for me.

Hillary said...

I need to start working out. I am running out of excuses...

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