Tue Apr 20:
I’m a lean, mean, (slow) learning machine. I have a new respect for the love of my life. What do you mean who! Excel of course. I watched a bunch of videos today on Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI. With the help of our IT guy, I know that we have access to Power BI, so I may download BI app but I have to keep in mind that our CEO is the end user, so I don’t want to be running anything from my machine. In the end, I should be able to hand this over to him. Or, how I understand it right now, I might not even need to hand anything over because as the sources get updated so will the dashboard. 🎶 Automatic. Automatic 🎶
I didn’t have any meetings; I planned to spend the day working on the dashboard and I was looking forward to, at minimum, having a draft doc at least started. Given that I hate doing anything manually, including picking my nose. I’d rather get tortured by having my teeth cleaned and/or pulled out with shit infested pliers than do anything manually. I put on my thinking cap (it looks like a dunce cap but it’s not) … I figure these guys, Sales, Finance, HR etc. already have data in their own various forms and places AND I, sure as time flies when you are having fun, do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, want to be the one collecting data from one place and entering it somewhere else. AND … I love my coworkers waaaaaaaaaay too much to ask them to spend time filling out more stuff. (plus, if I did, they’d be like, “Fuck you bitch. You’re not the boss of me.”) lol. Soooooooo – after all that, here is the bestest, most scrumdiddlyumptious part of what I learned today – Power Query AND Power BI can take data from various sources, clean it and transform it into what I need. Fuckin’ amazing. AND the other MOST BESTEST PART – I can combine Power BI with Teams! Mic drrrrrop! (can you hear the crowd going wild? … You should be able to, it’s not all in my head!). Bon! Bon!
Now – Given that Pivot Table kicked my ass (I made it to the second round) and these are supposed to be Pivot’s Iron Man big brothers, I feel like I’ve bitten off a tincy more than I can chew within the timeframe I have and my Thursday deadline is a bit too aggressive, because I gotta get familiar with the tools but I can learn while working on the db, so hopefully that will save some time. Let’s see how far I can get by Thursday. Even though technically, I didn’t DO any work, I got a lot done. Tomorrow, I am going to cancel my two meetings and spend the day with these new tools. BUT – I have to find out where those guys keep their stuff and if my boss would be comfortable with me looking at intimate financial data. I will send him an email later maybe. Maybe I will use my Thursday 1:1 to get more details on data sources and types – I have some written down already from all the reading I did yesterday.
I also bought myself a new monitor and stand with wheels – cause sometimes I cannot think at my desk. I find that when I need to figure out how to tackle something new, I can’t always do it in the same place where I do my regular work. Today I sat in the living room, and walked about the apartment while doing back-office processing in my head. Did I ever tell you, my brain can keep working on a problem, even if I am not consciously thinking about it and it just finds the solution for me. You know I talk about having two brains, it truly feels like it and this is also one of the reasons why – one in the front and the other in the back of my head. It’s like cooking in separate kitchens, sometimes the dishes are complimentary, other times they are totally different. I can never explain it effectively. Sorry.
Just when I was taking a break, I got invited to a product meeting – but I wasn’t in that headspace and since I didn’t have any meetings today, I wasn’t in work attire so I kept my camera off. (lesson learned – work hours is still work hours. Dress appropriately cause you never know). During the meeting, I couldn’t get thoughts of Excel stuff out of my head, I had no time to adjust. Good thing I didn’t have to talk and I’m glad someone remembered to invite me 🙂 … That reminds me. The sales guy that used to work with us always wanted to have debriefs after client meetings and one time, I had already moved on, mentally, cause I had another client session and I started preparing for it. So during the debrief I didn’t have anything to say and that upset him. Maybe he thought I didn’t care but that wasn’t the case and I couldn’t make him understand. “Listen, I’ve already moved on from that meeting. I already put it away and if I take it out to talk with you, I am not going to have enough time to reset for my next meeting. And right now, preparing myself for my next meeting is more important than chatting with you about something in the past.” You’d think it would be easy for me to switch but my brains don’t work like that 🙂
FYI – You’d never find me in a study group in uni. Ever! I need time to figure things out on my own and talking with people has never sped up my ability to learn or process. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind talking and sharing ideas, with one maybe two people max, but it has to happen AFTER I’ve had time to think on it. I tried different study groups, different topics but same result. I can’t get together with you to learn. There are too many thoughts flying around and I find it painfully confusing to pull out the useful bits. I need to be alone.
I am on my third story in Folktales of Bengal – I decided to start from the beginning. So far, I’ve read Life’s Secret, Phakir Chand and tonight I will read The Indigent Braham
palmsupward.com 
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