Oliver Roup’s Blog

I’ve long been a fan of Google Spreadsheet. Like all disruptive technologies, it doesn’t meet the needs of most customers of the incumbent product, Excel. I’m no banker, but even my relatively neophyte hands keep trying to hit F4 to lock a cell reference or hit F2 to edit a cell. I miss being able to right click to format a cell, the lag time of javascript sometimes annoys the crap out of me, etc… I would not try to convince a Wall Street number jockey to switch from Excel just yet. No way.

BUT, also like all disruptive technologies Google Spreadsheet is quietly getting good at things that Excel can only dream of. Since it launched, Google Spreadsheet has had great sharing and concurrent editing capabilities. A team at school used a shared Google Spreadsheet as a “factory information system” in a simulated factory exercise and it was amazingly powerful.

More recently, Google has added amazing data extraction techniques. Put =GoogleFinance(”Oil”, “Price”) in a cell and you’ll get the price of oil updated in realtime. The following will pull all the headlines off Techmeme: =importxml(”http://www.techmeme.com”, “/html/body/div[2]/div/div[4]/div/div[2]/div/div/div/strong/a”)

There are also functions for trolling arbitrary HTML, for parsing RSS and Atom feeds and for importing CSS feeds.

Where the mind really starts to boggle is when you think about how every cell in every google spreadsheet effectively has an URL. So it should be almost as easy to publish from your sheet as it is to pull in from somebody else’s. Suddenly, there are network effects for spreadsheets, where your work can leverage off the work of others. This ability to ref a cell in someone else’s sheet doesn’t seem to be enabled just yet, but I can’t imagine Google isn’t working on it. I’m sure there are some issues around permissioning and detection of dependency loops.

Throw in a little work on keyboard shortcuts and a little Google Gears magic to make the app more responsive and workable offline and Excel will be starting to feel the heat…

In the genuinely useful software dept., here is a little app written in C# (source included!) that will download an entire google web album. Great for grabbing copies of all of your friends photos.

All good things must end and so after the full moon party it was unfortunately time for our little group to head our seperate ways. Dan and Yara headed for Singapore, a bunch of the couples headed down to Kolanta for some relaxing (and no doubt romantic) time and I headed to Ko Samui to meet my college friend Beth and then head on to Bangkok.

Although I didn’t love Ko Samui physically after a place like Phangan, it was really fun to see Beth and her friends and hang out with some familiar faces. Time has an odd way of drawing people close. Beth and I were never that close in College but we rented a scooter and drove around the island (got lost really) and had a great day, heading for a buddhist temple (until we realized we were dressed too informally to go in) checking out the beach and generally just chatting the whole way. I got a flat tire on my bike (for the second time!) and was once again impressed with how entrepenurial and helpful the Thai people can be. 150 Baht ($5) and about 20 min and I was on my way, good as new. Yara had said that a similiar incident in Zimbabwe would have taken a week to fix and I can believe it.

After a week in Ko Phangan (Where does the time go?!) I have moved on to Ko Tao. This kind of travel really gives you a first hand view of the limitations of the Lonely Planet and it’s peers. While the books describe Ko Tao as very rural, without even fulltime power, arriving at the dock, you see a pretty thriving Scuba destination with plush resorts that exceed anything Ko Phangan has to offer. Oh well, good thing I love to Scuba dive!

I went out for two dives yesterday (first time in probably 5 years) and reminded myself how much I love it. Lots of great coral and wildlife including a huge sea turtle and a 3m reef shark. Great stuff. Today I am going out to “shark bay” in the boat of a local that my friend Danielle has met. These guys don’t speak a ton of English so we will see if we get what we expect. Lots of suntan lotion definitely required!

Ko Phangan

On my flight into Thailand, I skipped Bangkok entirely and on the advice of a friend headed directly to Ko Samui and onwards to Ko Phangan. It’s like each of those places gets progressively less developed as you go, with Bangkok as mega-metropole, Ko Samui as developed honeymoon destination ala Maui (with an awesomely cute airport) and Ko Phangan still bearing the traces of what people who came to Thailand in the 80s still talk about - simple and hedonistic. The big decisions are whether to lie on the beach or take a walk up to the lighthouse. I have not yet made it out of Hat Rin, the biggest development on the Island although still quite simple and laid back. Television has made a little too much of an inroad here and it feels like a big frat party but there’s still plenty of magic. Soon I will head up to Kao Tao an even smaller island focused mostly around Scuba diving.

I have never been very good at keeping a journal. In elementary school, I had an amazing English teacher, Mr. Lowndes and part of the assignment in his class was to keep a running diary of what we were reading, what I thought of it so far, and so on. At the end of the term, he collected them and graded them - for what I am not exactly sure, perhaps just to see that we had done them. Of course being the typical lazy student, I often would not keep up with the work and then, on the night before they were to be turned in, I would try and rush through a month worth of journal entries. It never worked of course - it’s hard to remember how you felt about something when you had less knowledge than you do now and my slacking was always obvious. Perhaps that was the whole point…

So it is with keeping a blog of my travels. It has been almost a month since my last blog entry and I’ve had the vague although diminshing hope that I would go back and “catch up” with the entries I’d missed. I’ve taken lots of great photos (captured here) but I have not been great about writing my thoughts. Part of it has been I find the keyboards in little Internet Cafes to be incredibly cumbersome, reminding me of my youthful problems manipulating a pen. Perhaps I will still go back and write about Brazil and Argentina from the notes in my trusty moleskin, but it is time to stop compounding the damage, not writing about today because I haven’t written about yesterday. Onwards.