programming

2017 B1G Championship Outreach Report.

December 8, 2017 by mcoughlin

What an exciting day God had in store for us as we ministered the gospel to the good folks at the B1G 10 Championship Game in Indianapolis, IN for the fourth time ever out of the 7 total Big 10 Championship games which have been played.

Caleb, Josh, Joe, Kenton, me & Kurtis pictured Left to Right. The six of us filled nearly 6 hours of preaching and handed out tracts to hundreds of people who need Jesus.

We had a really bad experience with the police in 2015 which prompted us to get a lawyer to assist us prior to this year’s event. So we arrived with a letter from a lawyer outlining our legal rights. Around 2:30, Kenton was approached by the police and he motioned for me to come over and talk to the officer. I tried to record the conversation which started with me giving him a letter we had from The Liberty Institute regarding free speech laws.

Have a listen to my Conversation with the Police It’s less than 6 minutes long.

The real money quote from the whole thing though was when the police officer said this.

You know what, if they come up and complain, then I’ll just tell them it’s their…their freedom of speech. That’s why we live in the United States.

It took all my energy to not shout, “Yes! That is exactly what you should be doing!” I’m so glad he came to that conclusion. May this cause you to praise our glorious God and Saviour, Jesus Christ who graciously allowed us to continue to preach and tract the crowds the rest of the day undeterred.

Kurtis calling sinners to repent and believe in Christ the Savior.

We managed to fill almost 6 hours of preaching that day. We competed with a loud music concert and even a small two man trumpet and drum band. Hundreds of people received tracts and thousands of people heard the gospel preached. We left 3 hours before game time, we could reach thousands more if we stayed in Indianapolis!

We are grateful to good brother Chris Dean who showed up with 3 pizzas and 6 water bottles for the crew. This allowed us to stay on the mission without leaving for lunch.

You can get an idea of the layout. For perspective, we stood directly to the left as you look at this photo to preach. The city blocks off Georgia Street and the entire street for one block is a big party with a big screen TV showing other football games, a music concert and food and drink booths.

As always, we sang a couple hymns and preceded most open air sermons with prayer. Our team worked hard and enjoyed very mild weather. It was actually a little warm until the sun went behind a building. We were prepared with handwarmers!

Thanks to everyone who has helped. So many people have contributed in various ways whether it is encouragement, service, financial help or prayer. Thanks you for your faithfulness! And praise God that He is ever faithful!

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Windows 10 Icon Removal and PERSONAL.XLSB Movement

February 28, 2016 by mcoughlin

I had a rather productive afternoon on my computer. If anyone needs help with these items, please contact me and I’ll help you. Long story short, here is what I accomplished:

I can’t stand the Windows 10 upgrade icon in the system tray (lower right). I had removed it before by uninstalling and hiding a windows update, but apparently windows packaged it again with a new update. So I wrote a batch file which I have start on system startup to kill the GWX.exe process which appears.
I had a number of personal macros I wrote a while back which got lost when my computer crashed (I know, I know). So I figure out how to edit the registry to change the location of the PERSONAL.XLSB file where personal macros are stored. I was able to put it in a folder which is backed up to the cloud.

If anyone wants help accomplishing these tasks, let me know by contacting me <<– (click the link).

Steve Jobs’ Final Wish

October 6, 2011 by mcoughlin

I don’t know a lot about Steve Jobs. I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and have bought a few iPods. I had never met the man: so how do I propose to know his last wish?

First we must review Luke 16:27-28.

²⁷ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— ²⁸ for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’

I believe that Steve Jobs’ final wish is that God’s law and gospel be proclaimed to those he loved the most in this world. Whether Steve Jobs is currently suffering the condemnation of God or worshiping the Creator now because he is in Christ Jesus – I trust his hope is that others will know who the One True God is. So where is Steve now?

I don’t know for sure. God knows each man’s heart; I do not. But what I do know is that if he was never born-again, if he never repented of his sin against God and trusted Jesus Christ as the only provision for the basis of forgiveness of those sins, then he is suffering the just punishment for his life of enmity with God – and so will you, without Christ. It is also possible that due to the mercy and grace of Christ, that Steve was covered by His sacrifice and is currently enjoying communion with his Savior. Enemies of the gospel of grace will call me callous for even using a recently deceased person as an example; and I am sure some Christians will find my take on the eternity of Jobs too weak, since he never publicly professed Christ and, in fact, professed a false religion (Buddhism, if my research is correct).

I cannot help Steve Jobs anymore. I cannot pray him into Heaven (a false doctrine of Catholicism called purgatory), and I cannot preach to him or plead with him to repent and believe the gospel. Josh Harris sent him the gospel a while back. I suppose Steve died with knowledge of how to be saved and we can all live with the hope that God had mercy on him late in life. What we cannot say is that anything we know about him indicated regeneration. We cannot just arbitrarily assume that Steve was “probably a Christian” because it makes us feel better, or because we lack the courage to allow people to believe that we think Jobs’ hellbound life remained uninterrupted by God’s grace. For we know the truth is that EVERY man and woman is hellbound. Every man and woman has fallen short of God’s standard and is accountable to God for their own sin. The question is not “Where is Steve Jobs?” The question is – “Have you been born again?” John 3:3-7.

I am sure many will think it is wrong to even refer to Jobs so soon after his death, especially concerning eternal matters. I, of course, would disagree. Assuming this dissension would come from people outside Christiany, the criticism is unwarranted, irrelevant and inarguable. There will be no convincing non-Christians of Christian things with clever arguments or sound logic. These folks simply deny the foundation of Christian beliefs (God’s Word), and, thus, can prove or disprove anything they want, arbitrarily. But let’s look at the Christian response: Are you a Christian who thinks there should be some waiting period before we discuss the gospel after someone dies? Or maybe you think the person’s name should never be used? I’d ask you this: how many people are you ok with perishing to eternal torment while you wait for the right time to begin discussing spiritual matters? Because you do not know, (as Jobs did not), who will be next, or when? What arrogance you have to believe that your non-believing family and friends and coworkers have even another breath in them.

So please, share the gospel NOW. Be gentle and meek, patient and humble – yet bold and confident in the power (Romans 1:16). Refer to the gospel not as your message to humanity, but rather the message of the Bible. Make sure your hearers understand that if they disagree with you, they are actually disagreeing with the Bible. And don’t take it too personally when they reject you and sling accusations at you, for if you properly share it – if you accurately express the message of condemnation of sins and hope in Christ’s righteousness instead of self-righteousness – your earthly existence ought not be too much better than the life of Jesus and John the Baptist.

Dear brothers and sisters, I beg you and command you in the name of Christ: “Go ye therefore.” You may impact someone for Christ who impacts someone for Christ who Steve Jobs desperately wants saved. You will certainly be showing your gratitude for what Christ did for you.

Delete duplicates in Excel

June 15, 2010 by mcoughlin

If this article doesn’t help you, consider dropping me a note with your concern. I have thousands of lines of code for hundreds of Oracle problems I’ve faced and would publish ones that people told me would be helpful. I have written hundreds of macros for Excel to solve basic to even quite complex tasks.

Once in a while I want to write an article on technology. Here is the first one.

Note: In Excel 2010 – this feature is built in and much more sophisticated than this script.

Have you ever had a large dataset (or small) that you imported into Excel somehow and you just want to remove all the rows that duplicate on a certain column? Here’s a couple quick macros you can use to solve your problem. Just copy and paste this code into a module in Excel VBA and run them like any other macro.

This first macro is really good if you just have a single column of data. Your focus (the currently selected cell) must be in the column of your data, and your first row of data should be in row 1. Additionally, you should not have any blanks in the dataset. If you do, just sort the data first and run this macro. It can remove a few hundred duplicates in seconds. If you are in the thousands…be patient, it can run a little while. I just ran it against a dataset with 10000 rows with only 386 unique values and it finished in just over 3 minutes. This doesn’t sound like long, but if you’re sitting there while excel is flashing, you may be tempted to end it early.

Sub DeleteDups()

    Application.CutCopyMode = False
    Dim offset, firstRow, lastRow, currCol, i As Integer
    currCol = ActiveCell.Column
    firstRow = 1
    Cells(firstRow, currCol).Select
    Selection.End(xlDown).Select
    lastRow = ActiveCell.Row
    
    Cells(firstRow, currCol).Select
    Range(Selection, Selection.End(xlDown)).Select
        
    Selection.sort Key1:=Cells(ActiveCell.Row, ActiveCell.Column), Order1:=xlAscending, Header:=xlGuess, _
        OrderCustom:=1, MatchCase:=False, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, _
        DataOption1:=xlSortNormal
    
    offset = 0
    For i = firstRow To (lastRow - 1) Step 1
      If Cells(i - offset, currCol) = Cells(i + 1 - offset, currCol) Then
        Rows(i - offset).Delete Shift:=xlUp
        offset = offset + 1
      End If
    Next i
End Sub

The second macro is good for any situation where you have multiple columns of data. You must first SORT the data on the field you are going to remove the duplicates based upon. Your focus (the currently selected cell) must be in the column of your data we are checking for duplicates as well, and your first row of data should be in row 1. It can remove a few hundred duplicates in seconds. If you are in the thousands…be patient, it can run a little while.

Sub DeleteDupsNoSort()

    Application.CutCopyMode = False
    Dim offset, firstRow, lastRow, currCol, i As Integer
    currCol = ActiveCell.Column
    firstRow = 1
    Cells(firstRow, currCol).Select
    Selection.End(xlDown).Select
    lastRow = ActiveCell.Row
    
    Cells(firstRow, currCol).Select
    Range(Selection, Selection.End(xlDown)).Select
        
    offset = 0
    For i = firstRow To (lastRow - 1) Step 1
      If Cells(i - offset, currCol) = Cells(i + 1 - offset, currCol) Then
        Rows(i - offset).Delete Shift:=xlUp
        offset = offset + 1
      End If
    Next i
End Sub

As always, SAVE your work before running this macro. You may even make a copy of your data first, just in case. If I had a penny for every iteration of an infinite loop I’ve written…

If anyone has any other programming needs, especially little things you might just want to be able to do at home, like track a budget, let me know. I’ll post more or just help you one on one.