Another record

 

I beat my 500m record by 10 seconds this morning.  Probably won't get a chance to beat it this week whilst being away unless I can do 1,000 laps in the hot tub.

I also beat my 200n record by 10 seconds 4m 25s.

Random pub crawl in Greenwich

 I took Tuesday afternoon off to go on a random pub crawl around Greenwich.  I haven't lived near there since 2006 I think.  Time has gone very quickly!

Free virtual gift

 I received a free virtual gift from LiveJournal today...  It's 18 years since I started my blog!  Wow.  That's a lot of live that's covered in here.

For those not in the know I moved from LiveJournal to Blogger in May 2008 and managed to migrate most of the old blog to this platform.

https://wat-de-fu.livejournal.com/

Time lapse from my office

 I was hoping to see a squirrel, no luck.

The next one I do will be the correct way up.  I don't want to be responsible for any neck injuries.  Maybe the next one should be of me with the phone flipped the other way.  Although not sure there would be any point, it would just look like a 20 second long photo.

Who would have thought?

 Who would have thought that i'd be foolish enough to work too hard?

After 6 days i've finally found out that my hours are 9-5.  Most companies in the city now work 9:30 to 5:30.  Luckily i've been working 9-5:30 so have not missed any time. 

Podcast overload

For some time now i've had an overload of podcasts.  Here are some of my subscribed casts.  Athletico Mince is by far and away the best and generally listen to that as soon as it's released.

I have a 10 minute walk to the train in the morning, followed by 10 minutes to the office at the other end.  So that's 40 mins a day, 5 times a week. 3h20m total per week, but I must have up to 10h of new product each week.  There are some that i've just had to cull, some I have to be more selective with.

I'd love to be able to listen to them at work but don't think I can concentrate enough on work whilst doing it.  I sometimes just put my headphones on with nothing on, but that's just to tone down the general office drone when I have to focus on a particular task.  It also has the benefit of putting people off asking questions and putting you off your stride.

When i'm off work in a week's time I may get a chance to catch up.  I have 55 recordings outstanding.

Decisions, what to do?

Can I be bothered putting in the effort anymore?

My time's limited.
It costs me money.
Friends don't seem that bothered.

Probably not.

10 year anniversary of the friend spreadsheet

Last week was the 10th anniversary of me starting up my 'Friends' spreadsheet.

For those not aware, I started keeping track of my friendship with various people I knew by scoring them a rating of 1 - 10 each week.  I now have 524 entries!

People have come and gone in this data set but there is a good core of 10+ that have been scored consistently over the past 10 years.  It also includes the occasional note as to why i've suddenly scored them a 6 when the previous week I gave them a 9.  All interesting reading i'm sure...

Why do I do it you ask?  I can't remember exactly why I started but I imagine it came out of me being annoyed with one or two people in the past.  Many people might think i'm not like this but i'm actually very forgiving in nature.  After the initial annoyance with any situation I generally revert back to my norm with most relationships within a day or two and tend not to think about it again.

Noticing this, I felt it was unfair on me and unfair on other friends that might want or deserve more of my attention by constantly forgiving people.  By keeping track of such things it's allowed me to use pseudo science to review certain friendships from time to time.  I haven't not stayed in touch with anyone due to this but have certainly pulled back on my interactions occasionally.

Before i'm judged too harshly on this, you all do it internally without knowing it, some are better at it than others.  It may even be unintentional, where you gradually over time lose touch with people that were once good friends.  But everybody does it.  I'm not unique, but out of all my friends I think i'm one of the few that consistently tries to stay in touch and to see what everyone else is up to.

Below are some of the your scores tracked over time

Current average score of the friends I track = 8.89 / 10 keep up the good work.  This is a high of 9.71 (Feb 16) and a low of 6.54 (July 2006). * This is only looking at the current live set of friends.

If you would like to know your own particular score please let me know and i'll arrange a time where we can have your appraisal...

Podcast fatigue

Over the past few months i've been really getting into podcasts. I'm not sure why I never bothered with them before but I do enjoy a good handful at the moment.

I am currently subscribed to about 10 podcasts, most are around an hour long and update once a week. That's a fair load of hours to sit through. Luckily I have 2 hours commuting time each day and up to 4 hours in the gym each week. However it is quite easy to create a quite considerable back log whilst going through some of their back catalogs at the same time.

I'm also aware that since picking up the podcast bug i've also stopped reading. On my recent holiday in Morocco I brought with me about 5 books and didn't pick one up for the whole trip.

Maybe I should cut back...

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Hurry up time

1h40mins before 5days holiday.  Hurry up damn you!  I'm in for 2 days next week then another 4 days holiday.

January went so quick

Looking at the date in the bottom right of my screen tells me that it's February already. Jeez! January's gone so quickly and I didn't really do anything.

Wow! Something from IT that actually works.

As many of you know at the beginning of the year I was seconded into IT for 3 days a week (now only 1 day per week) to help them with their business reporting.

It has been a very frustrating time for me as we’ve been using the new data warehouse, in principle it’s a great idea having all of your data connected and in the same place but in practise I have rarely seen it work.

I am using COGNOS to interrogate the data and have found it so slow and unpredictable. It almost brings me to tears when it takes 30 seconds to run a report one day then the next it takes more than 30 minutes.

With the particular data set that I use, a major problem is that the data warehouse stores more than 100 fields of data on a transactional basis. This means that we have over a million records with 100+ bits of info each. Simple maths tells me that that’s over 100,000,000 single pieces of data. It is no doubt that it takes so long to summarise the data. In fact as the company will only ever get more information it will only become more of an issue.

In reality, to do my job (this part of it) I can do 95% of my analysis using only 20 fields and a grouped up level of data. A much more manageable 100,000 lines of data, for those with a maths GCSE that’s 2,000,000 bits of info, 50 times less than before.

Anyway… I suggested this nearly 7 months ago and they’ve finally done it for me. A report that I’ve created in the old system used to take between 10 minute and an hour now took less than 1 minute to run on my first attempt. You might think that that is impressive but that’s not the half of it. The development and testing of these reports will be much more time efficient, rather than running a report to see if it works then twiddling my thumbs and hanging around on the off chance that the report works. I will now know practically instantly.

Thank you IT. I never thought I’d hear myself saying that.

I think my experience in IT would have been much better had they listened to me from the beginning but hey, I’m sure I’ll get over it…