Fri, Aug 13, 2010

Depart: 05:15 pm Auckland, New Zealand (AKL) Air New Zealand, Flight 6

Arrive: 10:15 am Los Angeles, CA (LAX)

Depart: 01:55 pm Los Angeles, CA (LAX) Air New Zealand, Flight 9140

Arrive: 10:28 pm New York, NY (JFK)

The Flight Back to New Zealand

Thu, Sep 2, 2010

Depart: 11:30 am New York, NY (JFK) Air New Zealand, Flight 9147

Arrive: 02:38 pm Los Angeles, CA (LAX)

Depart: 11:45 pm Los Angeles, CA (LAX) Air New Zealand, Flight 5

Arrive: 07:55 am Auckland, New Zealand (AKL)

Arrive Sat, Sep 4, 2010

Then, she burned.
Oh, how she singed and sang.
She warmed his cold lesions.
She scorched his grand eloquence.
She doused his innards in fire.

She had been Roosevelt’s courage,
When he departed his wife’s bedside.
She had inspired iconographic hangings,
When the muse’s rope snapped short.
She had given the suitor succor,
As he pondered where the ring went wrong.

Now, he kissed her.
Then, he drank her.
Always, he needed her
Whiskey kiss.

We seek our needed nutrients.
We pull our soft minerals.
Mining,
Shafting,
Drilling,
Pounding.
Together, we pulverize where we came from.
We dig until there’s nothing left
But scrag
and slag
and shag.

We fuck stone.
We transmute our metals into rust.
I bury my fingers into your loam.
I mine.
You mine.
We each others mine
As we fuck stone.

I woke up with a cigarette clenched between my lips.

The smoke had become omnipresent of late –

Some socially, acceptable cancer,

the kind you can joke about –

a little black lung tumor humor.

Later, I rolled up with all the guilt and pleasure

of a someone who knew better,

who could do better,

Like clandestine royalty visiting a brothel.

For the span of a cup of coffee

and a few puffed signals,

I was an incognito prince.

She scorched a Sakura blossom.
The pink petal drifted on a hot wind
and then slowly curled
edges blackening like burnt paper.
I smelled a cherry scent
tinged with an aroma of vaporised flesh -
her perfume.

The shadows grew real,
as she made them elongate.
Their names etched in stone.

Only I could survive her.
Years of war had lined me
with lead and concrete.
Like some mad Oppenheimer,
changing history for the sake of curiosity,
I had blinded myself with my slated glasses.

I stood transfigured
With heaped ashes of spent lives
Swirling as she came.

You were beautiful, once.
You were as pretty as the faded floral dress,
hanging, gimballed, off your bony shoulders.

Unlike most sons, I see you every day.  
I watch you bleach and fade and loosen.
I watch your flowers go a little more gray.
I pass by your usual bench
as I walk to work.
You still wear the fuzzy, mint green slippers,
From a Christmas,
eight years ago.
You occasionally bark crude solicitations at the young men.

Yet, you never solicit me.
Even, if your milky eyes only perceive
a motion blur of pinstripes and briefcases and silver wrist watches.
You never bum a smoke.
You never ask for change.
You never say, “Thank you,”
when I press a fifty into your thin hand.

I love you, Mom.

I wonder, “What are those marks on the ceiling?”

Shit?  Or blood?

Then, I start to think about Christ.

And a forensic analysis by the Pharisees.

And how the bible mentions how he bled.

And how on the crucifix, he always has a loin cloth on.

How dead people tend to shit themselves.

I wonder, “What’s that running down his leg?”

I turn my gaze to the space behind the toilet.

I discover, “That’s where my wedding ring went.”

In Excel 2007, if you are trying to manipulate the Pivot Caches in multiple pivot tables, be careful.   The seemingly innocuous pivotcache.index property is a potential trap.  Note, that you can only change the pivotcache on EXTERNAL data by setting the CacheIndex.   ChangePivotCache is for internal use only (and doesn’t exist in 2003).

Take this code:

Dim masterIndex As Integer

masterIndex = masterPivotTable.PivotCache.Index

destinationPivotTable.PivotCache.Index = masterIndex

This sets the pivot cache of one pivot table to another.  It saves on memory and makes the pivot tables share the same data source.   Really handy for automating reporting.

However, there’s a trap here.   In Excel 2007, changing the pivot cache automatically removes the old pivot cache.   It works in 2003, and I suspect it keeps the old worksheets floating around.  This can create invalid indexes if you are not careful.

If you use the first worksheet as the master, that’s fine.  Its index will always be 1.  If you use a subsequent worksheet as a master, its index will change as you update subsequent reports with a lower index.

Pivot Cache Indexes Before Update:

• 1
• 2
• [3] Master Index
• 4

When you update 1, the indexes look like this:

Pivot Cache Indexes After Update:

• 1
• [2] Master Index
• 3

Why?   Because the old index 1 got removed and the pivot caches got reindexed.

Fortunately, all of this is easily avoided.   Instead of tracking the index, track a pointer to the pivot table instead.

Dim MasterPivotTable as PivotTable

‘Insert your pivot table here

Set MasterPivotTable = Sheet1.PivotTable(1)

destinationPivotTable.PivotCache.Index = MasterPivotTable.PivotCache.Index

That’s how you swap a pivot cache properly, without the two days of a random 1004 error.

Fuck, I hate excel.