Rain, which we need — we are in an extreme drought, meaning crop and pasture losses and widespread water shortages or restrictions. Or at least in the literature. According to the Southeast Regional Climate Center‘s 2011 State of the Climate (PDF) two metrics, the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) suggest the dryness in the region throughout much of last year hasn’t been experienced since the early 1980s. They note this period is “comparable to the dryness experienced during the drought years of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s.”

Not that you’d know it by media coverage or water consumption. That probably sounds preachy, but it is meant as an observation. There are slides in that climate report that compare today to the 2006-2008 drought, when cities put out traffic signs urging you to conserve and then the 1998 to 2002 drought. Where I worked toward the end of that period one town created a water use hotline. If you saw people wasting water they asked you to call and report it. People could not wait to tell the police about their neighbor’s luscious lawns. It got so chaotic the police closed the hotline.

You don’t even hear people talk about it this time.

Me? I’m just ready for the neighborhood pool to open.

So it rained a lot today. We live in an area that with a sandy loam soil. We’re right on the geographical border of the Appalachian plateau and the upper coastal plain, so it is dark in places and sandy in other places. And today the water stood on it. When you can make water stand on sand for more than a few minutes you’ve poured a great deal of water on it, .84 inches today.

So that kept us inside. The baseball game was canceled hours before they played it. There’s a doubleheader tomorrow.

Today, just hours and hours of spreadsheets. I think I did three or four hours, which is really six weeks in spreadsheet years.

At the end of it all I had a wonderful example of the truism that this is an age of being able to find information. Once, a few centuries ago, some people knew everything. Not many people, but a few folks had the essence of the sum of human knowledge. Enter Gutenberg, more academies, schools, science, the Enlightenment and the benefit of Flintstone vitamins (brain food!) then things became really expansive. Before long a single issue of a good newspaper, supposedly, had the equivalent amount of information of our ancient polymaths. Once it was what you know. As we learned in school it is: what you know, what you can cram and what you can find in the card catalog.

Of course, these days it is what you can find on Google. Or, as my friend Ike Pigott says, you find it in your network. (And, thus, it is who you know, it will forever be who you know. That’s really the network he likes to talk about in his presentations.) Pigott is coming to speak to my students Monday, so I’m riffing here on some of what he presents. But the important part, these days, is that you know how to find information.

My example of this, was in trying to find a solution to an Excel problem. I was combining four different spreadsheets, removing the superfluous cells and making everything line up nicely. The bigger chore was removing the redundancies. Some of these lines had the same names and contact information. I searched on Google for something like “removing duplicates from Excel.” My Googlefu is strong because I’ve built enough pages and sites to write them both as a designer and a reader. In a game where finding the right word combination is the key I’m usually a big winner.

Only this search was giving me the typical Microsoft tutorial written by a committee of technical writers. The phrase you need is “conditional format unique values,” an expression of bland words grouped together, whose mere existence can wring the life out of any joy you had on a rainy Saturday, and that is before you skim the tutorial. I’m not interested.

I asked my lovely bride if she knew how to “conditional format unique values.” Being a very smart person, she does not know because she has no use for such phrases, I’m sure. But, being a very smart person, she said “Why don’t you just sort alphabetically and delete the duplicate rows?”

(See? That was all about who I know, who happened to be sitting in the same room. I networked well on the homefront.)

I was coming to that idea, actually. I’d had the idea and got sidetracked by this paragraph:

Filtering for unique values and removing duplicate values are two closely related tasks because the displayed results are the same — a list of unique values. The difference, however, is important: When you filter for unique values, you temporarily hide duplicate values, but when you remove duplicate values, you permanently delete duplicate values.

Sometimes asking Google is not the easiest answer. Sometimes you need your own personal expert. That’s the power of your network. From now on I’ll just ask an Excel question aloud. The look I receive from someone who thinks it a stupid question can’t be worse than reading stuff like that.