My last post was the day after election day. I guess I’ve been drowning in my sorrows since then. A lot of stuff has changed in the world, but not much has really changed for me personally. Christmas and New Year’s Day came and went, kids got out for break and went back, and we had MLK day. Really, though, that’s been about it on the home front. Did get a great vacation scheduled for the end of March, and as long as we can get back in the country afterward, we’ll be fine. Not to worry, I’m as white and hillbilly as they get.

The election really got me down. I didn’t sleep right for a couple weeks and I even went to the women’s march here in Cincinnati after Inauguration Day. I’ve never gone to a protest before, and it was really cool. The folks there were from every walk of life and every category of people you can think of. Yet everyone was happy to see each other!?! Strange times we’re in here.

From a tech perspective, I did finish most of my Microsoft Intro to Data Science class on EdX, though I didn’t get all the labs finished in time to get a “grade”. Doesn’t matter…the grade wasn’t my goal. Learned some neat things that I can do with Azure ML…not that I’ll be doing them anytime soon, but the applications are darn near endless. What is Azure ML? Basically a system where you can feed in data, tell it the cleanup to do and the algorithms to apply to it, and output answers. What kind of data? Any kind. What kind of answers? The ones to the questions you might ask. Like, “Tell me if this new loan applicant is a safe bet or not?” or “Group baseball players by abilities so I can see who gets my Hall of Fame vote.” Good stuff. Not that I need or act upon either answer, but it’s interesting anyway.

Other than that, not much new here. Oh, and we’re working on some things to move off of our infrastructure servers over to Platform-as-a-Service, or whatever you want to call it. Really slick stuff that I’m excited about. The days of IT folks managing hardware or even virtual machines are numbered, I tell ya. Like it or not. More to come on that later.