lianna-vba

The prizes are really cool. The winner of the sister competition (more finance focused) gets a large 'diamond' encrusted ring.

I encourage anyone who enjoys problem solving and Excel to sign up for the upcoming 2024 competition. Who knows, maybe you'll get flown out to Las Vegas to compete in the finals next year?

https://fmworldcup.com/product-category/battles/

Gideon the Ninth was hilarious. Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy and Martha Wells' Murderbot series have a similar mix of great storytelling and snark.

That's funny, I just added Disco Elysium to my Steam wish list yesterday.

Thanks for the recommendation, I just grabbed a copy.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut was that book for me this year. It's an odd blend of fact and fiction covering a handful of 20th century physics and math discoveries. Alexander Grothendieck, Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg all appear.

Besides The City & The City I really enjoyed Kraken and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville.

Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum.

Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.

You can customize your quick access toolbar. I've never seen a rule against 3rd party add-ins so I'm not sure about those. Keyboard shortcuts and lookup/logic/date/math/dynamic array functions are key along with data tables if you want to try and solve the challenge in one go.

Oh hey, I've been in two of FMWC's live competitions (though not this one) and their regular offline almost-monthly competitions.

VBA is allowed - I've used it but no one else seems too. Power Query and LET/LAMBDA is a little more common and named ranges (variables) even more common.

It's fun but going into the challenge blind is so stressful. What if your brain goes blank and you can't figure out where to begin? But there should be another Open live tournament this November or so with cash prizes, check it out.

You can tactfully tell your manager that in a 1:1. I've had co-workers do that - the volunteering employee gets severance and the manager doesn't have to stress about a name for the list.

Success depends on your relationship with your manager and if they actually have control over who gets let go.

I was at Case when the Peter B Lewis building opened. I don't recall people getting hit by falling ice but they'd put up warning signs and maybe close the main entrance after snow (which in Cleveland was often). There was a shooting in the building too. It took 7 hours for the SWAT team to find the gunman and get the hostages out. Apparently the curvy walls and large atrium design are a complete tactical nightmare.

Tsuro is a good one, Timbit.

For the same reason I like Patchwork. It's a competitive quilt building board game for two people.

I didn't know there were 3 more Azules! Which would you recommend getting after the original? Wikipedia mentions Stained Glass of Sintra, Summer Pavilion and Queen's Garden.

Then vice president Teddy Roosevelt was on a hiking trip in the Adirondacks when he received word that president McKinley had been assassinated. It's crazy how back then the VP could be so hard to track down. In fact, I believe the night FDR passed away VP Truman had ditched his secret service agents to head to the bar.

https://www.adirondack.net/history/midnight-ride/

I have two computer game books on my to read list - Sid Meier's Memoir! and Ken Williams' Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings.

In the 90s there was an accounting scandal that caused the downfall of Sierra, it's a pretty interesting read [0].

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3vem8/inside-story-sierra-o...

It happens sometimes for any number of reasons. At GE people wrote 'see you soon! :)' on a co-worker's retirement card because retirees typically would return as a contractor doing the exact same job.

Perhaps less common, Larry David rage quit his writing job at SNL on Saturday and returned to the office Monday like nothing happened [0].

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/larry-david-re-enact...

That's a good point about awareness of sites with affiliate links. Doctor of Credit and https://www.frequentmiler.com are my top two, though there's overlap between them. Doctor of Credit has the best credit card, bank and brokerage sign up bonus lists and Frequent Miler has good point redemption guides.

I've been using Bubble for a few years for a side project. I always thought I'd use it just for the MVP phase but haven't had a need to move off it yet. The big downside is speed - the home page takes 2.5 seconds to load even after doing all the recommended optimizations (Cloudflare, fewer plugins, fewer styles, etc).