by ezs | Oct 12, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – misleading Tweets from Trump removed. US cases up in 48 States. Early voting continues despite distancing.
Weekly summary of Washington State cases:
Friday – local outbreak of COVID-19 at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. Continued reporting of massive European case surges. US Thanksgiving could be another superspreader weekend. 8M cases in the US. 220k deaths. 400k new global cases today.
Thursday – Remdesivir doesn’t prevent COVID deaths. UK lockdowns continuing amidst much confusion and pushback.
Wednesday – multiple WA counties improve – and start opening back up. 38M global cases. Watched Totally Under Control last night.
Tuesday – this looks a lot like March – with rapidly climbing positive cases across the globe. The only difference being rather than 30k cases per day it’s 300k cases per day. US daily cases is a classic fast, slow, fast pattern.
Monday – continued mixed behaviour from Senators – masks, positive tests, no masks, video attendance. French declare second wave is here. J&J vaccine trial paused.
by ezs | Oct 5, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – “Trump immune to Covid” claim; Twitter removes tweet. Midwest cases climb. UK cases huge rise. UK at “tipping point”
Weekly update from Washington State via The Seattle Times.
Friday – 350k new cases globally. New cases accelerating – similar to the spring.
Thursday – record global rise in new cases, clearly we are in the midst of a new wave. Serious hospital cases are the lagging indicator – and ICUs are filling rapidly across Europe and the US.
Wednesday – very much the two sides of the coronavirus story. Europe and US with increasing cases, lockdown and protests. White House coronavirus spreading and the (mis)information being spread about that. Scotland cancels 2021 exams. BBC summary.
Tuesday – the slow moving second wave continues to break over Europe. French ICU, Ireland Level 5, UK lockdowns.
Monday – more cases in the WH. Continued confusion over Trump’s health and care regime. Ireland heading for total lockdown. Cases rising across the US.
by ezs | Sep 29, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – truly incredible the speed that “Trump has COVID” to “Trump is in Walter Reed” progressed. More of the WH and Senate are positive. Record COVID case increases across the midwest and west US.
Here in Washington State, cases are picking up again. Visuals from the Seattle Times.
Friday – Trump has COVID, as have many in the WH. Masks and distancing work.
Thursday – fare collection starts back up on public transport in Seattle/King County after six months.
Wednesday – Italian Senate closes as multiple senators test positive. Most of Europe in the grip of rising cases.
Tuesday – AFP reports “60M Indians with COVID”
Monday – Week 30. 1M deaths globally from COVID-19. Over 200K in the US. Refresh of the milestones since January from the BBC. BBC daily summaries removed.
by ezs | Sep 24, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Another re-certification.
Back in 2007 I earned the ITIL v2 Manager exam – two weeks of in-classroom learning and two long, handwritten exams!
I took the v2 – v3 Manager Bridge in Brisbane back in the summer (winter!) of 2008
This week I studied for and just passed the ITIL v4 Managing Professional transition.
No in-person training this time because of COVID – so online training and four long books to read.
by ezs | Sep 21, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – a quarter of the UK under new lockdowns. R >1 and the numbers are really alarming again. Continued protests globally about masks and restrictions.
Usual data from The Seattle Times. Small uptick in cases last week.
Friday – “1 in 500 in UK has Covid”
Thursday – coronavirus continues to mutate, become more transmissible. France, Spain, Portugal – record rise. 5% increases since last week across TX and much of mid-west US. Increasingly become a rural virus.
Wednesday – Second wave continues to sweep Europe. UK political fallout around unclear advice.
Tuesday – Flu vaccine awareness needed in the US. Looks like the BBC daily summary is back.
Monday – UK told to prepare for “50,000 new cases per day”, Boots pausing flu shots for under 65s. US around 200k deaths. WA State cases are dropping. Bleach being sold on Amazon again as cure for Covid.
by ezs | Sep 15, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – UK heading back to country wide lockdown. WA State rate of positive tests is dropping from around 5.5% to around 3.1% – which is a good sign. Not enough test capacity in the UK.
Friday – Pandemic means less European election monitors for US vote. Canadian border restrictions in place until end of October.
Thursday – Continued confusion around CDC advice and guidance.
Wednesday – many “back to school” virus outbreaks. No widespread vaccine for a year.
Tuesday – more restrictions in UK to break transmission chains. This is back to “the hammer and the dance”
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.
by ezs | Sep 7, 2020 | evilzenscientist
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.
by ezs | Sep 6, 2020 | evilzenscientist
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.
Passed and happy for another two years.
by ezs | Aug 31, 2020 | evilzenscientist
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.
by ezs | Aug 29, 2020 | evilzenscientist
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.
Recent Comments