This is going to be a very long how-to post, so I'll ditch my usual long intro.

To install the Cyanogenmod custom ROM on the Samsung Galaxy S2, you'll go through three easy steps. Unfortunately, most blogs have managed to make it extremely hard to do - it's either they didn't put up any step-wise screenshots supported post or they write it out like a help/documentation file. So, I have decided to make the ultimate how-to guide and you can be sure you won't brick your phone.

Have you met Microsoft Excel?

I remember my first encounter with her 6 years ago, while in my 3rd year in the university. Our most geeky lecturer told us to make a GPA calculating sheet in Excel. That day, he moved up significantly in the disliked lists of most of us. In fact, I attributed my not-too-good grade in his course to that assignment. Then, I believed MS Excel is a specialist software like AutoCAD or Matlab, to be used by some industry and research geeks for some esoteric work. And that as long as I don't land a finance job, my world will be much better without MS Excel.

I was right. I didn't get to use Microsoft Excel until I landed a Business Analyst job doing some finance stuff day in day out (+ holidays and some weekends). And my corporate world has never been brighter. Monday to Friday are now my favourite days of the week, and holidays aren't really that special anymore. I now see myself as a magician, doing the seemingly impossible with data (of all sorts), saving the company money, making the company money and getting better at it. Now, I experience what career experts say - Find a job you love and work will be fun.

So, meet Microsoft Excel -

I prefer to split the entire MS Excel window into - menu bar, body and footer.

A close friend and colleague at work once asked me, "Michael, why are your blog posts more of - 'how I became...' and 'my...'?"
I have no premeditated reason for it. As I blogged more, I felt more comfortable expressing myself in my usual offline conversational tone. But, before you conclude that I must be narcissistic, kindly read the following disclaimer - whatever idea of me you come up with has got nothing to do with me.

So much for the preliminary, now to the main post - My journey to becoming Nigeria's first MS Excel MVP.
I hope you've read my post on How I became a Microsoft Excel Consultant. 
So, to rev up my reputation, I am working on making Microsoft award me the prestigious Excel Most Valuable Professional. And till anyone can prove otherwise, I'm gonna add Nigeria's first before the award title.

The most interesting part is I will be explaining the miracles of Microsoft Office Excel from the basics (what are rows and columns) to the most complex VBA I have written (over 1000 lines of code). And I am giving you the exclusive right to interrupt me and demand a post written specifically to solve any Excel issue you are facing. But you will need to be a little patient with me though, juggling work and going to work is already killing me. I might be very slow in granting your request, but I can assure you that I'll definitely grant it and even over-deliver on your expectations.

I've got to hit the sacks now, I need to wake up 4hours 10mins from now, or I'll get to work by mid-day.

Chapter 1, Part 1 here

The Beginning here

However, today hasn't been all bad. In fact, the drowning of our family albums has been the only sad occurrence today. And to be sincere, today has turned out to be a very good day. Fatai, one of the single-room tenants in the 40-room apartment adjacent to our house, won a lottery yesterday evening. And today, he is celebrating it. He has been playing Baba-Ijebu every evening for the past 8 months, since his bosom friend won N50,000. And yesterday was his own lucky day, after the evening prayers, he went straight to the lotto stand, and ended up picking the winning number that bagged him a whooping N250,000.
The noise from the 4 feet tall locally made speakers, 5 of them, is deafening. Since noon, there has been a big party, all the youths in the neighbourhood are sitted, standing and waltzing from end to end in the empty space that separates our house and Fatai's. I have been having a swell day too, for the first time in my life I not only tasted beer, I also drank an entire bottle of Star Lager beer and two 20cl bottles of Chelsea dry gin. And argued with some six other boys on who has drunk the most alcohol. Being the most scientific, I have been proving to them that a single 20cl bottle of dry gin has got more alcohol than a 60cl bottle of beer. But they were too vain and lousy to listen or understand. And not too long into the argument, I began to feel sleepy, my speech became slurred and I became very scared, and immediately staggered into the house and headed straight for the bed.
This wasn't the first time someone in the neighbourhood won a lottery. Four months ago, Jide, another single-room tenant living in the 26-room apartment opposite our house, won in a Coca-cola raffle draw. He won a Volkswagen Golf, but since he could not drive, he sold it to Emeka (his next door neighbour) and bought the biggest air conditioner I have ever seen. After installing the air conditioner, taking up the entire lower half of his window, he bought a very noisy generator to power the air conditioner on most nights. The generator was so noisy, three other tenants moved out of the apartment when they could not prevail on him to change the engine. If only they had been more tolerant, because just three days after the last of the three moved out, Jide decided to service the generator. And Yusuf, a co-tenant who works full-time as a generator repairer, is still servicing the generator, for six weeks now. Some people say that he has never serviced a generator that big, others say he is trying to get at Jide for not giving him the contract of purchasing the generator. And now, every night for the past 8 days, Jide has been threatening Yusuf. He screams every night at the top of his voice that he is going to get Yusuf arrested by the police and locked up forever if the generator is not restored to a working condition by month end.
Life in these multi-room apartments is a strange mix of comedy and tragedy. Just last week, Tunde married his next door co-tenant, Jumoke. And now, they have broken a portion of the wall separating their rooms, to install a door between the two rooms. Tunde's room is now the living room and Jumoke's room is the bedroom. It's the cheapest house upgrade I have ever seen, I just hope Jumoke won't mind continuing the rent payment for the room, considering that Tunde now sleeps there. Just yesterday, there was a mother of all fights in Fatai's apartment. Soji had just come back from a friend's birthday bash, and went straight to the shared toilet. God knows what he ate at the birthday party, but he used up an entire hour offloading his bowels, and locking out twenty people waiting to use the toilet. When he finally came out, there was a free-for-all fight, as all the twenty people tried to enter the toilet at the same time. It was so terrible, Tinu lost half a crate of empty Pepsi bottles, six people were stabbed with broken bottles, four had knife cuts and two were beaten senseless with blows. In the end, several of them had to go visit their friends in other apartments just so they could use their toilets. Every morning there is always a long queue in front of the toilet and bathroom, some tenants wake up as early as 3am just to beat the queue. But only Mallam Ali has successfully developed a winning scheme, he takes his daily bath only at nights.
But living in such an apartment has its unique advantages. There is always ample audience/participants for every event you do - from an in-house football competition to the burial of a grand-mother nine states away. And you are never short of a helping hand - be it people to help put out a fire at 2am or  to help with the cooking and event set-up at your wedding.
Though my parents are against me befriending the other children living in those apartments, I have managed to put them in the dark as regards my blooming friendship with most of them. Every late afternoon, when my parents are not yet back home, I shuffle between several of those apartments visiting my numerous friends. They excite me with the stories of the day-to-day happenings in the apartments and I help them do their school assignments. My closest friend is John, he lives in the apartment adjacent to ours. He moved in there with his mum, four months ago, after his father kicked them out of his 6 bedroom mansion without a divorce notice or severance pay. The father claimed he has found a new love and wants to start his married life afresh. John is the only boy in the neighbourhood that is as intelligent as me, and his spoken English is way better that mine. But I beat him hands-down when it comes to written English. In fact, he occasionally bribes me with some chewing gum he steals from his mother's store, to make me do his English essay assignments. But what I love the most about him is that he doesn't shout and curse like the other boys. The other boys are very vain, they have swapped out every greeting and common words with swear words.
Even though today's party is at John's apartment, he didn't join us in drinking beer and dry gins. And when we teased him and called him mummy's pet, he simply stayed silent and watched us. He is really the best behaved boy in the neighbourhood.

Next Part

It's amazing how I can't remember any of my primary school friends, and dumbfounding that the only people in the first decade of my life who have made it in my memory to my thirteenth birthday (two months ago) are - my parents, my two sisters, twelve relatives and three family friends.
We had moved from Ile-Ife to Lagos when I was just 8 years old, and it was more than a location change. The rapid behavioural adjustments I had to make, no doubt, precipitated this amnesia, and not until after two years in Lagos was I able to make a new friend.
But today, something terrible has happened and now I have truly lost a decade. It has consistently being raining at midnight for the past four days, and today's rain came around 1:00am . As expected, our two bedroom flat became a mini dam, taking in water from under the two exit doors at the peak of the rainfall and letting it out after the rainfall. But the unexpected happened too, today's in-house dam reached a new height and flooded the lowest drawer of a cabinet that houses the entire family photo albums. And all my childhood photos are now ruined, the faces I'm struggling to remember are all gone, perhaps, forever.
Our family albums have joined the ever expanding list of casualties claimed by this recurrent flood. The first was our beautiful cream color saxony carpet, just two months after we moved in from our rented three-bedroom apartment in the same suburb, barely a year ago. Initially, I blamed my dad for this, for building on a parcel of land right in the middle of a valley. Then my mum explained to me that this parcel of land wasn't actually the one my dad wanted, that this was sold to us at one and half the original price to pay off the financially strait owner and compensate us for the loss of the parcel we had earlier bought. The parcel my dad really wanted and earlier bought was snatched from him when a banker suddenly showed up and took us to court claiming he had bought that same parcel of land 8 months before it was sold to my dad by the same land agents. And so for the first time in my life, I learnt the hard lesson: If the desired is not available, the available becomes desirable.


Next Part

Very few people can give you a better first hand information on the terrible-ility of Lagos traffic.
I work a regular 8 - 5 job (gone are the days of 8 - 4 or 9 - 5), so I actually spend 8hrs (minus-ing the 1hr lunch break) on the job. But believe you me, I wake up 4am daily and get back home at 9pm (upwards). So I spend 17hours every weekday on an 8hr weekday job!
So where the f did the other 8hrs (taking back the 1 hr lunch break) go to?! Well, it went to rushing to beat the traffic and getting stuck in the traffic.

But thatz not what this post is about.
Rather, I want to show you how to made hours spent in traffic something to look forward to.

Have you watched Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford University commencement address? If yes, then you'll remember his talk about connecting the dots backward. It can't be more true than in my life!

I have this black-hole sort of mind, that never stops absorbing everything around me (currently seeking satisfaction in books written centuries ago). So like Mr Jobs did say, "You can never connect your life's dots forward but only backward". I have stopped trying to streamline my learning/reading and stopped trying to connect my life's dots forward. Now I simply learn all that interests me and overfeed my ravenous mind.

The latest result, is that I have somehow morphed into a Microsoft Excel Consultant. 
And in this post I intend to connect the dots backward to show how this remarkable change occurred. 

You're probably like me, with a Blackberry phone and BIS subscription and have a separate Internet modem to surf the net on your computer.
Well, I'm going to show you how I surf the net via my MTN Fastlink and my Android phone without any extra charge, just by using my Airtel SIM with NGN1,400 BIS complete subscription plan. And I download heavy files and do all sorts online without any extra charge or buying a data plan. The NGN1,400 BIS complete gets you 1GB data bundle you can use on any device or internet modem of your choice. In fact, if it's exhausted before the 30days plan coverage period, no problem you don't need to wait out the expiration, just follow the how-to here and you can subscribe 12 times in a month (if want). But, if you don't want your BIS plan to auto renew, easy, just follow the how-to here.

And believe me it is crazy simple! And you'll nearly hit yourself for never trying it.

Just make sure you have configured Airtel internet settings on your MTN Fastlink modem. Then insert the Airtel SIM that is already subscribed to BIS plan.
Click connect on your MTN Fastlink software, and VOOM! You'll be surfing the net for free!

In fact, I am writing this blog post via it and have already downloaded 100MB earlier today without a single kobo charge!

I hope you've read my I need more money post, where I talked about how I live from payslip to payslip.
You see, I'm one of those guys who find it nearly impossible to have a savings. I only save to buy some fancy gadget, I find it extremely hard to stash away cash just for the sake of having a savings. I can barely do that for more than two months, 'cos every night my mind will keep coming up with auto-suggestions of what to do with the money.

What ruinous mind I've got!

So, how do I get the best out of my salary?
Well, everything with a bad side definitely has a good side too. Fortunately for me, my mind that makes it hard for me to have a savings also made it extremely easy for me to pursue a wholesome lifestyle, one that is devoid of (nearly) all bad habits I know. So, I end up spending money on just the real necessities of life and one luxury hobby (Swimming). The only time I spend money unwisely is when I have a savings.
At the onset of my working career I tried saving and ended up plunged into a vicious loop of living frugal in the middle of the month and extravagantly after pay-day and the beginning of the month. And believe me, I really tried to break out of the loop but it seemed beyond me to accomplish.

But with the help of my hard-working, though still ruinous mind, I found a great workaround. I found out that I love taking risks. My first swimming experience was in a big river; I put (nearly) an entire year scholarship grant into stocks (and happily lost all); spent my entire free cash after school on a DSLR camera right in the heat of my job search; went to Cotonou for a one-month French language immersion without having any contact there (and got robbed too)... And I'm mighty proud of taking those risks, without the tiniest feeling of remorse.

So back to the main question - how I get the best out of my salary?

I recently got a Samsung Galaxy S2, costing me more than my two months free cash, and though there is now a Samung Galaxy S3 yet S2 is still a very highly rated android smartphone. In fact, it was named the best smartphone at the Mobile World Congress this year 

I won't bore you with the details of all the great timeless features of the phone that makes it a kill. But I will be stunning you with the crisp screenshots that show you all my choice applications on the phone and my widget filled homescreens.

 HomeScreen 1

HomeScreen 2

HomeScreen 3