From Ranger to IT

  A Little Comfort During My Days as a Private I was always hungry when I was a private. Hungry for food, yes—but especially hungry for something sweet. Looking back, I still don't know why Choco Pie, something I barely ate before joining the military, tasted so incredibly good. One bite, and it felt as if the hardships of military life simply melted away. Choco Pie is a Korean snack made of soft cake layers and marshmallow filling, all coated in chocolate. I loved that feeling so much that I wanted to keep the whole thing to myself. Maybe that was why so many soldiers hid Choco Pies in their personal boxes. Food wasn't allowed in the barracks because of the risk of attracting mice. If we were caught, we could be made to run around the parade ground for an hour carrying our full packs and rifles. Still, nobody seemed willing to give up their Choco Pies. And even after taking that risk to hide one, you could still end up having it stolen. Once, I reached into my personal box and...

 The Day Every File Became an MP3 About five years ago, a ransomware attack brought a small company's entire computer network to a standstill. I was the company's outside IT person. They paid me a fixed monthly fee to manage their computers, network, and backups. I had been looking after their system for years. It started with a phone call on a Friday morning. "Something's wrong with our files. They've all turned into music files." Music files? I knew immediately this wasn't going to be a normal Friday. I told the employee not to touch anything and drove straight to the office. When I arrived, the problem was already spreading. One employee had opened an email attachment that looked harmless. Within minutes, JPGs, GIFs, DOCX files, and almost everything else had been encrypted. The files had strange new extensions, and none of them would open. The company's computers were all connected to the same network. That was the problem. The ransomware moved fro...

  Safe today, Safe tomorrow Ranger training takes place in the mountains, which means it demands real nerve. Of all the courses, the ones that involved crossing  between peaks or rappelling down them brought out a special kind of fear. So I let trainees with a fear of heights sit those out and do PT instead. A small mistake up there could easily turn into a matter of life and death, and if it did, my assistant instructor and I would be the ones to answer for it. And "answering for it" meant exactly one thing: military prison. To keep that from happening, I went over the safety rules more times than I could count, and I made a point of never forcing anyone through. Even so, something unexpected always seemed to happen. The One Rope Bridge was one of those things. The One Rope Bridge Course The One Rope Bridge is a course where trainees cross a mountain gap along a rope about thirty meters long. They wear a harness clipped to a double safety line, so even if someone slipped, th...

If you work with lookup tables in Excel, XLOOKUP is one of the most useful formulas you can learn. It was introduced by Microsoft in 2019 as the modern replacement for VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP—so if you haven't come across it yet, that's completely understandable, especially if you learned Excel before then. If you haven't read my earlier post on HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP , I'd recommend starting there and coming back to this one afterward—this post builds on that foundation. HLOOKUP vs. VLOOKUP vs. XLOOKUP HLOOKUP—use this when your reference table is laid out horizontally VLOOKUP—use this when your reference table is laid out vertically XLOOKUP—works in either direction and fixes several long-standing annoyances with the older two formulas Why is XLOOKUP better, not just newer? It can look to the left of the lookup column, which VLOOKUP can't do. It doesn't break if you insert or delete a column in the middle of your data You can specify a custom "not found" va...

A Golden Retriever in Doberman’s Clothing. During my service, I was a ranger instructor for American soldiers. I spoke some English naturally; the army decided I was qualified to yell at Americans in the mountains. At first, I was happy about it. I figured my English would improve while I was in the army. Then I saw the training grounds. My happiness disappeared. I couldn't imagine surviving there. The job was pretty much the opposite of who I was. The army was already crawling with guys in their early twenties, and the ranger course was the kind of place where you had to have enough testosterone to power a small city. It was also dangerous. One wrong move could lead to a serious accident, or worse, so everyone had to stay tense from beginning to end. And the instructors were expected to be intimidating. We were supposed to have enough presence to make trainees nervous just by standing there. Discipline was everything. Kindness was, apparently, not part of the curriculum. The first...