i have THE coolest brother and sister in the world. no, seriously. SERIOUSLY. note the capitals. and note that i never use capitals. that must mean something.

here i am on one side of the world, sitting at my computer in utter despair on saturday morning (belgium time) as i cannot figure out how excel works and how to get little graphs to graph stuff that needs to be graphed.

and there is my wonderful brother on the other side of the world, sitting at his computer on saturday night (nz time), about to save my life.

i send him my little excel file. he opens it. there we both are. opposite sides of the earth. in front of two computers. looking at the same data.

then he proceeds, via msn (a simply marvelous lifesaving contraption), to tell me step by step how to make graphs. he says things like 'okay, now highlight these columns, and then press this button'. i follow his instructions. when i get it wrong, i.e. what i end up having on my screen is nothing like what he has on his screen, he figures out what i did. and how to fix it. then he proceeds to say things like 'hang on, let me see, i think this might look even better' and takes me through a different range of instructions that gets me a different graph.

four hours later it is 1pm here in belgium, 1am there in new zealand. my very cool brother just spent his entire saturday night helping me with maths. from one side of the world to the other. i then saved the little msn window dialogue box and used it for the rest of the weekend to remind me how to do stuff. brilliant. absolutely brilliant.

and then there's my sister. also very cool. who just saved me about 20 hours of work. literally.

i have these numbers in a table that was created in this programme i use. the numbers have decimal points. with a '.' point like is used in new zealand. however belgium have this weird system where they use the comma instead of the point in excel. i needed the data in excel to make graphs. so i thought i had to go through and change every decimal point into a comma so that excel recognised it as a decimal. this probably makes no sense. oh well. the point is (ha ha ha, the point. get it? obviously you can tell i'm tired and have spent far too long on this computer when i start making jokes like that!) that i have 35 tables, each with 50 rows of numbers and i was going through one table at a time, converting each decimal point to a comma, on every single row. this takes a long time (hence the bad jokes).

rachel came online. i sent her one of the tables and she said she would see what she could do. two minutes later (yep, only two, actually probably not even that to be honest) and she had the solution. man. now it takes me one second, one button, and suddenly all my points are commas.

i could (and perhaps should) say that i am so glad that such technology exists that i can communicate with no time lapse at all from here to home and back again. and i am glad. however despite technology having good points, it also causes me to want to rip my hair out (more often these last few weeks then ever before in my life).

on the other hand, i am very glad that i have a brother and a sister who are quite happy to interrupt their day or night to help me solve dilemas, that, despite not being such a big deal to them, mean a huge deal to me. and save me from going insane.

so thanks. :)