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Posts pending:
- Modular quick-release camera strap
- Brain filters and how people see software
- Vision therapy: Part Three
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Personal
We made it through the freeze mostly in one piece. We did lose power, unlike the 2021 storm, for about 28 hours. In some ways it was a nice opportunity to disconnect for a bit—cook outside on the grill, listen to the sounds of the rain and trees falling, see the wildlife, etc. No hot water and no Internet was a bit of a pain, though. I think we lost more trees this time than last and it's going to be a while working through the cleanup.
I got on an organization kick and have been putting up hooks and hoists in the workshop and shed to get things off the ground and stored. There's a ton of storage here but it hasn't been utilized well and getting it organized helps a lot with this.
Work
I recently took a promotion with CVS Health to a manager role for the Retail Pharmacy Contact Center group supporting reporting and analytics. This is aligning my title and role with my actual skills and not so much a real promotion, but it's a step in the right direction. I moved with my management chain to the new team, so which is nice because trust is important and already established.
My focus on the new team is on ETL pipelines and process automation. The big initial lift is cataloging and automating the process of loading data from our various data sources into our data warehouse. The current system is supported by a mess of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, which has some downsides.
The scale at which a company as large as CVS operates has been eye opening. When you're dealing with ~10,000 stores a year's worth of daily data for the whole fleet is already 3.65M rows. Not exactly big data, but beyond the scope of what Excel can handle, which led previous implementations to aggregate at the monthly level with presents some significant difficulties for modeling.
Reading
I put down Ward for now in favor of Mother of Learning, another web serial fiction, but this time with a fantasy bent, after recommendations from a couple friends. It's quite enjoyable so far, though much less literarily interesting than Worm.
Finally sitting down and reading It Starts With Food fully instead of skimming various selections.