Monday – another new week of school at home. Cases on the rise everywhere. UK testing chaos. Removing the BBC from the daily updates next week.
PC rebuild – so late getting this started.
| The Seattle Times | The Guardian | BBC | |
| 14 Sep | here | here | |
| 15 Sep | here | here | |
| 16 Sep | |||
| 17 Sep | |||
| 18 Sep | |||
| 19 Sep | |||
| 20 Sep |
Weekend – UK vaccine trials resume. Fall/autumn flu combined with Covid will be really devastating. Brazil deaths >132k.
Weekend numbers from The Seattle Times:
Friday – Fauci says “vaccine in late 2021”. UK continuing towards huge uptick in cases. R>1 in many cities.
Thursday – Record cases in Europe. Same story repeating in UK, France, Spain, Portugal.. long list. Trump “misled public” about severity of Covid.
Wednesday – US numbers declined, plateaued, now rising again.
Tuesday – England heading rapidly towards a second nationwide lockdown. Week 2 of “back to school, online and at home”.
Monday – Labor Day – and the end of a hot extended weekend. Generally in western WA I see masks being worn, there are plenty of folk who will not. The BBC live coverage is back.
| The Seattle Times | The Guardian | BBC | |
| 7 Sep | here | here | here |
| 8 Sep | here | here | here |
| 9 Sep | here | here | here |
| 10 Sep | here | here | |
| 11 Sep | here | here | |
| 12 Sep | here | here | |
| 13 Sep | here | here |
Way back in 2015 I passed the 70-534 beta exam “Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions”. As a beta exam, taken internally, there were seemingly hundreds of questions.
Since then, Microsoft changed their certification program, moving to role-based certification (and as an aside moving all certifications to be around cloud solutions).
Time to re-certify.
First up – review the certification path. The Azure Training paths are pretty well called out.
Azure Fundamentals – AZ-900. As a personal stretch I decided to take this exam, not just as a standalone piece of certification, but to prepare for leading a couple of cohorts of colleagues at work through a “minimooc” team led set of training. The exam was relatively simple – but using the experience was helpful in mentoring others across the team to be prepared for and pass this exam. My personal goal is to support some re-skilling and re-certification of the majority of the Infrastructure Services team by year end. The Microsoft Learn site gives much of the content for the exam – but not quite everything.
Next up Azure Solutions Architect. Two exams (AZ-300 and AZ-301, or the newer AZ-303 and AZ-304). I sat both pairs; I learned a heck of a lot about Cosmos DB that I didn’t know a month ago.
Weekend – BBC missing again. Labor Day weekend in the US. Another gathering point for family, friends – and another reminder around masks and distancing. 3000 new cases in the UK – some from additional testing. No end in sight for any of the restrictions.
Regular update for the week from The Seattle Times. Second peak is slowing, death rate is dropping. WA DOH continues to not report “total tests” – so there is no indication of positive test rate.
Friday – 6.2M cases in the US. 200k cases per week. 190k deaths. No daily updates from the BBC again
Thursday – “vaccine on its way” says CDC.
Wednesday – Pelosi mask distraction. 185K US deaths.
Tuesday – looks like working from home is in place for maybe six more months. Today school-from-home started. All of us, in the house, in different rooms, having meetings online. US will not work with WHO on vaccine. US is starting to consider herd immunity – which failed in the UK.
Monday – Half a year. Feels like the meta-aggregation diary of Pepys. 25 million global cases, 6M in the US, WH vs Task Force differences. The tone of the news is moving from “hopeful” to a grimmer place; reflecting resurgent infections.
| The Seattle Times | BBC | The Guardian | |
| 31 Aug | here | here | here |
| 1 Sep | here | here | here |
| 2 Sep | here | here | here |
| 3 Sep | here | here | here |
| 4 Sep | here | here | |
| 5 Sep | here | here | |
| 6 Sep | here | here |
More fun this morning with grappling DAX to pull out the data I need.
We write multiple tags to Azure resources – from the resource group down to anything that takes them. Makes showback, accountability, support so much cleaner.
The tags are returned, in a non deterministic order, via the billing API – and look like this (data cleaned up), a list of tag/values. JSON-like ish kinda.
“application“: “Shared SQL“,”project“: “Shared Database Engineering“,”costcenter“: “1234“,”itowner“: “Buckley, Martin“,”supportgroup“: “Database Engineering“,”businessowner“: “Buckley, Martin“
I was looking at some DAX to pull this apart; PowerBI has a native “extract text between delimiters” function. It’s not going to build a tree of arbitary values; but I can now cleanly extract the tags I need to build this datamodel.
After I get this working, it might be time to pull all of the discrete DAX steps together to make it more efficient against a vast dataset.
Fun times on a Saturday.
Follow up to this. Extracting multiple pieces of insight from the tags – that drive KPIs for service improvement:
– resource groups with no costcenter tag (this is the cardinal sin – no costcenter and showback isn’t there, getting to health on this is easy)
– resource groups where itowner or businessowner don’t meet business rules (ICs can’t be owners)
– resource groups where the supportgroup is not valid (it doesn’t match a ServiceNow Assigment group)
Most of all – I can find everything tagged with “placeholder” or “set by policy” and sweep that broom through the tagging.
All in all – a good few hours of work.
SLES on Azure.
Windows Server 2019.
Nice and easy.
Weekend – a handful of confirmed “re-infections” is a worrying sign. Will a vaccine even be effective?
Weekly reminder of the state of the State from The Seattle Times. Plateau – but not safe.
Friday – across Europe travel restrictions are returning – similar to earlier in the year.
Thursday – “undeniable surge” in France, South Korea struggling to contain outbreaks. Second wave? Maybe. How these cases are suppressed is going to be vital learning.
Wednesday – the never ending flood of news is numbing. Trying to sustain empathy with 24M global cases, 5.8M US cases, 820K global deaths and 180k US deaths is hard. US politics are working to suppress the numbers and the news. Meanwhile Italy has surge of cases. Russia approves second vaccine.
Tuesday – Today India, Turkey, Spain again. US back to school is starting to prove a disaster.
Monday – it’s nearly September. Birmingham, UK continues towards lockdown. Boris says “go back to school”. We know how this ends. HK confirms re-infection.
| The Seattle Times | BBC | The Guardian | |
| 24 Aug | here | here | here |
| 25 Aug | here | here | here |
| 26 Aug | here | here | here |
| 27 Aug | here | here | here |
| 28 Aug | here | here | here |
| 29 Aug | here | here | here |
| 30 Aug | here | here | here |
Weekend – was planning a late week camping trip; PNW National Parks are “over full, over flowing, over used” – there is no availability. Folk are heading to the mountains and lakes.
Sobering: 800k global deaths. 23 million cases. WHO says “pandemic over in two years”.
The Seattle Times weekly graphic:
Friday – continued stories of “folk rushing back” to avoid lockdown and quarantine. It’s not the time to be heading on long haul trips for vacations tbh.
Thursday – Russia vaccine trials starting. Vast amounts of European cases. BBC saying “end of first wave” not a second wave.
Wednesday – King County reporting “lower ratio of positive tests” but spiking elsewhere.
Tuesday – more vaccines in clinical trials. Korea sees new cases.
Monday – reports of mutated Coronavirus strain. Will there be any chance of a vaccine? My guess is yearly variants like influenza. Much like the US, exam results are in disarray across the UK. Spain new cases spike.
| The Seattle Times | BBC | The Guardian | |
| 17 Aug | here | here | here |
| 18 Aug | here | here | here |
| 19 Aug | here | here | here |
| 20 Aug | here | here | here |
| 21 Aug | here | here | here |
| 22 Aug | here | here | |
| 23 Aug | here | here | here |
Weekend – Weekend continues to report European second waves, US deaths.
The update from The Seattle Times for the week. Case count is trending down. Deaths still at low double digits. Too high for reopening.
Friday – UK quarantine chaos. Europe second wave. 167k deaths in the US, 5.3M cases.
Thursday – US death toll highest since May.
Wednesday – New Zealand outbreak in Auckland. Will be interesting to see how the track and trace works for this – and how the cases emerged.
Tuesday – BBC have the daily updates on the front page again. Clearly second wave rolling through. Russia has a vaccine ready for test; unknown what the initial testing looks like.
Monday – work from home is going to be the normal for at least six months – so this is really a COVID news tracking page for me now. Week 23, it’s August, summer is passing, back to school is all virtual. I’ll keep aggregating the news stories – and try to remain above the political fray. As we approach six months I will try and reflect on what 2020 has looked like. BBC summary returned.
| The Seattle Times | BBC | The Guardian | |
| 10 Aug | here | here | here |
| 11 Aug | here | here | here |
| 12 Aug | here | here | here |
| 13 Aug | here | here | here |
| 14 Aug | here | here | here |
| 15 Aug | here | here | here |
| 16 Aug | here | here | here |
Weekend – long read on the VIC, Australia outbreak. MLS season is restarting. Long read on Vietnam success and second wave. BBC summary is missing again (Saturday and Sunday). 5 million US cases; that’s 1.5% of the population confirmed with a positive test.
Weekly summary of Washington State from The Seattle Times.
Friday – good read on the US failure to contain and control coronavirus. Tests are down statewide and US wide. More UK lockdowns as a second wave rolls through.
Thursday – much discussion about track and trace, use of phone apps, national vs state. What a mess. US travel restrictions are lifted – but no one will let US travelers in.
Wednesday –
Tuesday – one bright spot – that the local positive test results are trending in the right direction. King County Public Health shows 1.6% positive cases in Issaquah between 13-27 July.
Monday – pretty much everyone I know who thought this would be over by “early summer” is now thing “early 2021 at the best”. Massive borrowing globally to prop up economies and keep people going. WHO say there may “never be a silver bullet” against COVID. As noted several weeks ago, this is going to become part of the annual flu/COVID shot discipline. UK lockdowns return. 18.2 MM cases confirmed, 691k deaths. US numbers may not be trustworthy.
| The Seattle Times | BBC | The Guardian | |
| 3 Aug | here | here | here |
| 4 Aug | here | here | here |
| 5 Aug | here | here | here |
| 6 Aug | here | here | here |
| 7 Aug | here | here | here |
| 8 Aug | here | here | |
| 9 Aug | here | here |
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