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[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
Go to work on a regular basis.
Art is hard. Selling is hard. Writing is hard. Making a difference is hard.
When you're doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out--this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it's time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break.
Zig taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don't allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, "hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap." If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.
Isaac Asimov wrote and published 400 (!) books using this technique.
The first five years of my solo business, when the struggle seemed neverending, I never missed a day, never took a nap. (I also committed to ending the day at a certain time and not working on the weekends. It cuts both ways.)
In short: show up.
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Grand Rapids Michigan Outsources Airport Parking Operations To Private Firm Posted: 20 Dec 2010 03:58 PM PST The trend towards dumping public unions continues to escalate in cities across the country. Latest on the list is from Michigan where a board votes to outsource parking operations at Grand Rapids airport Airport leaders unanimously selected a private firm to take over parking operations at Gerald R. Ford International Airport today, despite impassioned pleas by employees who will now have to reapply for their jobs and likely face pay and benefit cuts.In an article just prior to the decision, the Grand Rapids Press noted ... Parking agents who do maintenance and assist customers can make between $14 to $19 an hour, not including tips. Those jobs also come with nearly a 33 percent medical and fringe benefit package.The union members are complaining about fairness. What can possibly be more fair to everyone than putting the contract out to bid to 5 competing firms and taking the best offer? What's 100% fair is to watch out for taxpayers, not unions. Expect outsourcing to intensify. It will be a major theme in 2011, and a very welcome them at that. Taxpayers have simply had enough. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:01 AM PST Here is an interesting video about the unintended consequences of various government actions. Ignore the lead-in message about hyperinflation and the scratchy-sounding start of a Fox News segment on BP and oil in the Gulf. Once the video gets going, the message about unintended consequences is very well presented. Link to Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij4H9M55c64 Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
New York Times 10th Annual Year in Ideas; #1 Idea: Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:37 AM PST For the past 10 years, at the end of the year, the New York Times discusses 10 ideas for the past year. The ideas vary widely and may pertain to social trends, sports, or war. The lead-in idea for 2010 was "Do-It-Yourself Macroeconomics". It certainly is an honor to be mentioned along with the Big Picture and Calculated Risk. Here is a snip from the 10th Annual Year in Ideas. For the 10th consecutive December, the magazine has chosen to look back on the past year through a distinctive prism: ideas.Please see the article for a wide variety of other ideas. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog |
Excel For SEOs: Manipulating URL Strings with Functions Posted: 19 Dec 2010 01:17 PM PST Posted by MikeCP Over the past few months, I've been preparing a guide with the tentative title, Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas. I've embarked on this great journey because sometime during the #Mozinar back in September I decided that my Excel abilities were far too limited, especially compared to all the smarty pants that were giving great presentations and advice about SEO data analysis. After talking with some of my colleagues I found that I wasn't alone in my feelings of Excel inadequacy. So Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas was born as a means to help others by documenting my quest for Excel Ninj-ocity. The full document will be released sometime in January, but here is a selection that I hope provides some value alone. While having a working knowledge of the functions described below can help with a multitude of SEO tasks, the specific tasks that we'll be completing in the following include:
-----SNIP----- Lesson 2: More Functions - Text ManipulationThe functions on which we'll be focusing in this lesson are useful for dealing with text manipulation. As we'll see from the examples, there are quite a few scenarios wherein the SEO has to manipulate a text string. Some of the formulas we'll talk about are pretty simple to grasp individually, but can get a bit confusing when used together. We'll touch on:
LENMicrosoft Excel Definition: Returns the number of characters in a text string. Syntax: LEN(text)
SEARCH/FINDMicrosoft Excel Definition: Syntax: SEARCH(find_text,within_text,start_num) and FIND(find_text,within_text,start_num) There are two differences between SEARCH and FIND. SEARCH is not case-sensitive, FIND is. SEARCH allows the use of wildcards, FIND does not. Under most circumstances, SEARCH is all you need, but it helps to know that FIND is always there if you've got to deal with pesky capital letters in URLs or something similar. Another reason to choose FIND is if you're dealing with URLs that contain parameters. Without properly escaping question marks, they will act as wild cards, which may cause some frustration. In our example below, we've pulled out the character number at which the "/blog/" string begins. Much like LEN, this function is a bit silly on its own, but can be combined with some of our other functions to do some cool things.
The IFERROR syntax: IFERROR(value,value_if_error)
LEFT, RIGHT, MIDMicrosoft Excel Definition: Syntax: Both LEFT and RIGHT return the characters from a given position in a text string starting from either side of a string. MID is great for extracting a portion of a text string. I've lumped the three together because they are often used in conjunction with each other (along with a few of the earlier functions). Let's dive into an example: Bringing it all together - Example 1Let's say we've been given a list of URLs, and we want to extract just the domain. This formula will do the job. Let's break down this nested formula, and see how it pulls just the domain out of our URL. Starting from the middle we see SEARCH, which uses the syntax: SEARCH(find_text,within_text,start_num) In plain terms, this formula finds the first instance of "/" in the cell to the left, starting at the 8th character from the beginning, which is done to start passed the double slash in http://. As we see below, the result for the first row of data is 22.
Now we are left with a simple LEFT formula. Remember, the syntax for LEFT is LEFT(text,num_chars). In plain terms: Give us the first 22 characters starting from the beginning. The number of characters differs depending on URL, but adjusts accordingly when applied to the rest of the table. We now have a nice listing of just root domains.
Example 2Let’s use SEARCH (with wildcards) and MID together to extract a portion of a URL:
We’ll definitely be making use of MID, as the text we want is in the MIDdle of our string. We’ll need to determine how many characters make up the "-tXXX.html" bit at the end of each URL. Since the length of this portion of the URL varies, but the format doesn’t (that is, "-t" + "numbers" + ".html"), we can use wildcards to find this character count. Again, the syntaxes for these 2 functions: Let's break down the formula for the first URL in our list. Cell A2: http://www.example.com/lamp-maintenance-t83.html =MID(A2,SEARCH("/",A2,8),SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-SEARCH("/",A2,8)) =MID(A2,23, SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-23) We've calculated the first instance of a "/" after the 8th character. This gives us our start_num values. We're also using the * wildcard to help us get the character count of the right-most chunk of text. =MID(A2,23,SEARCH("-t*.html",A2)-23) =MID(A2,23,40-23) We can easily calculate the number of characters for our MID once we know where our non-descriptive characters begin. =MID(A2,23,17) /lamp-maintenance Hooray! Example 2.5Let's make a small adjustment to our original URL to demonstrate how we can use LEN in this formula. Cell A2: http://www.example.com/t1521-lamp-maintenance.html =MID(A2,SEARCH("-",A2)+1,LEN(A4)-SEARCH("-",A2)-5) =MID(A2,29+1,50-29-5) lamp-maintenance The additional +1 and -5 are necessary to make minor adjustments to the final outcome. Without them, our final result would have been "-lamp-maintenance.html". -----SNIP----- Thus concludes the sample lesson on manipulating text strings in Excel. I hope you've found it useful, and not too confusing! If you have any questions, ask away in the comments and follow me (@MikeCP) and @Distilled on Twitter for more info on the full release of Excel for SEOs: Lessons for Aspiring Ninjas. There's much more where this came from, including bits on pivot tables, VLOOKUP, Index/Match, OFFSET, and more! |
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