Urban Adventures & More

I have long wondered about Roosevelt Island: who lives in the mix of public housing and gleaming condos? (No one; they live in either one or the other. Har har.) How do you get there? What is there to see?

Last summer I noticed the green ring on the bike map that encircled the island, and figured that it was easy enough to get to — go over the Queensboro bridge and turn left — that I added it to my list of trips. The interest was heightened by an article in Essential New York, and one in the Times.

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Following is my suggested route for what I call the “circum-Manhattan bike tour.” It is all river, (almost) all the time. It’s also an amalgam of two rides I did; in the first, my uptown leg was all on the streets, and on the second, I discovered the superior uptown (river) route. Since I haven’t done the whole route, I have only an approximate distance of 31. See the bottom of this post for the map with some annotations, as well as the official city bike map.
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If you listened to me and installed dropbox, kudos! I hope you love it as much as I do.

I just started using the software to collaborate on files, and found that it behaves very funny. In particular, when you open an excel (or other MS Office file), Dropbox does not sync the file to the server until after you close it. Furthermore, if a person opens an excel file, even if they make no changes, dropbox will mark the file as changed and potentially create a conflict.

The solution, according to this forum post is to mark your spreadsheets as collaboration. As a result, excel doesn’t lock the files, so saves will be synced automatically, and changes will be merged across files. (And presumably, changes will also be updated as you work on them, but I’m not sure how that works).

I haven’t tried this yet, but I will follow up in a few days once I have had a chance to look at it. I can see that dropbox may still get confused as two people are editing the same file (particularly macros, which don’t like to change once you have opened a file), but I think MS has probably conquered this problem by now.

This tip is for anyone who frequently adjusts the number of decimals visible in a number range. Sure, you know to hit Ctrl-1 to make it an orderly set of numbers, but what if you want only want to show the integer part, or if you want to see 4 decimal places? Instead of using the mouse to click the appropriate toolbar button, the trick lets you assign a hotkey to that, or any other toolbar button.

1. Right click on the formatting toolbar and go to “Customize”.
2. Right click on the toolbar button you want to assign a hotkey to (in our case, Decrease or Increase Decimal)
3. If you want to make the hotkey “Alt-/” then change the text in the Name box to “&/”. If you have an “opposite” function, for example the opposite of Decrease Decimal is Increase Decimal, then this automatically makes Alt-Shift-/ perform that opposite.
4. Change the button style to “Image and Text”.  (If you want to disable your hotkey, you can change this back to Image only.)
5. Close the Customize window, and you’re done!

(Adapted from Bankers Ball link above.)