Category Archives: General

Setting the To value: cell in Excel’s Goal Seek to a Cell Reference

Sadly, it took awhile to “figure” this out. I was trying to solve a set of equations in Excel. I had one equation in one cell, say B1, that had a dependency on the value in A1. I had the second equation in cell C1 that also has a dependency on A1. I wanted to set cell B1 equal to CELL C1 by changing cell A1. You can’t do this with Excel’s Goal Seek feature, the To value: has to be a number.

The solution of course, was to create a third cell, D1, with the formula “= B1 – C1”. When those two cells are equal, as I wanted, D1 = 0. So now you can ask Goal Seek to solve the set of equations by setting cell D1 to value 0 by changing cell A1.

Yay!

NBA 2018 Bracket

Okay, the NBA bracket challenge has a horrible interface! As a reminder for future years, don’t use this! Go with ESPN or someone else. Having said that, here’s my NBA bracket. I think it shows my picks except for the Blazers, who got their asses swept by the Pelicans, so zero points there! Amazing that was the series with a sweep.

Go Warriors!

NHL 2018 Playoff Bracket

Here it is. Haven’t followed much hockey this year but going with the heart!

P.S. I do have a second bracket with Tampa Bay taking the east and the Preds winning it all but I’m not posting that one 🙂

FTP on macOS High Sierra

As you may have noticed, FTP is no longer a part of macOS High Sierra. If you are in the Terminal, you’ll get something like this:

Norms-iMac-Pro:~ norm$ ftp
-bash: ftp: command not found

An Apple Forum’s post has this reasoning.

Fortunately, there is Homebrew to the rescue. As pointed out in that post, you can install the `inetutils`, which includes FTP. All you need to do is:

brew install inetutils

Unfortunately, for me, this resulted in a linking error, as the directory `/usr/local/share/man/man8` is not writeable. You can solve this by by issuing the following command:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/share/man/man8

Then run the link command again:

brew link inetutils

I hope this is helpful and happy FTPing!

NBA 2017 Playoff Bracket

The #NBA in general and the #Warriors in particular are the only league/team I’ve really followed this year. So, here are my picks. I feel good about the first round, although picking the #Bucks hurt. The second round, especially in the East, was a little trickier. #WarriorsGround

NHL 2017 Playoff Bracket

Well, here it is. I confess I have not followed the NHL at all this season, with the exception of checking in on the Leafs every now and then. And they (the Leafs) have been a nice surprise. This “first” playoff run will be great experience for the youngsters. I would LOVE to see them put the Capitals out in the first round. Also, I hope Edmonton can continue their “cinderella” season. Finally, Pens to repeat!