I live in the UK and on Sunday night our current leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was admitted to hospital after 10 days with worsening COVID-19 symptoms. Until that point, his ministers and aides had been spreading the message that he was suffering only mild symptoms, continued to work from self-isolation and was expected to be Read More
We Need More Leaders And Fewer Politicians
Right now in the middle of this pandemic, we are still seeing people in positions of authority putting appearances and politics ahead of the public good. For example, we have President Trump of the United States passing on the recommendation that people wear masks to prevent spread of the disease covid-19 from asymptomatic people, but refusing Read More
Coronavirus Update
Finally, after a couple of tense weeks when the writing was already on the wall, the UK government has advised the public to work from home if they can. It is such a relief, as it has been clear for at least a week that this should be happening. I live in London, the hardest hit Read More
Eating My Ego
Today I attended a tutorial with my probability and statistics tutor for the Data Science degree. It was around a half hour just me and him, which let me work on the really basic stuff that I don’t understand, and an hour with another student attending to work on the more complex stuff. I felt bad Read More
BI Reporting: Excel Stuff
Following on from my post yesterday, I wanted to give a small update. I’m now halfway through the Excel certification that contributions to the BI Reporting badge and I am learning some useful new features. As I mentioned before, I’ve been using PowerPivot for around 4 months, and while I’m aware there is still much to Read More
Getting Certified in BI Reporting
From looking into the learning around Power BI, it seems like the difficult part is combining data and adding calculated measures. For the last 9 months, I’ve been using Power Query and for the last 4 months I’ve been using Power Pivot. Both of these are the backend in Power BI that drive all the data Read More
Learning To Relax
I’ve been thinking about how I take care of myself, which makes this article my wife shared with me quite timely! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work Basically millenials, those of us in the 22 to 38 age range, are burning out. This is because we are trying to do everything just like our parents did. But the current economical and Read More
Preparing Myself For The Future
Something that I have always been comfortable and good at is learning new work skills. My Excel skills for example have only gotten better and better and been the backbone of my career for the last 5 years. With all of the different jobs I’ve undertaken that were heavily Excel focused, I’ve also developed great analytical Read More
There is no ‘proper’ way to read
Some time ago I wrote a post about Blinkist as being akin to speed dating for books. You get snapshots of what the book is about, edited for enjoyment quite likely, lasting but a fraction of what a traditional date would in comparison. One of the responses I got to that through Twitter was that it Read More
Interrupting bad behaviours to replace them with good
I’ll be honest, for a little while I let myself get wrapped up in news stories. Predominantly the stuff going on with Trump in the US and the nonsense going on over here with Brexit. Sure, some of it was entertaining and we all like to let ourselves get a little outraged sometimes, but following the Read More