This was an interesting book - not a guide to happiness as you might think at first, but an explanation of some of the psychological reasons why we are bad at predicting what will make us happy. He has some tips at the very end, but mostly it’s a jaunt through the interesting things our brain does to try to help us, and when those things can backfire. This is part review, part me-keeping-notes-for-the-future....
I thought I’d start making better notes on non-fiction books I read and post them here as a bit of a reminder to myself for lessons learnt, and a sort of tracker for interesting books I’ve read. Thankfully, the local library has quite a large selection. First is The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket. This is one about the food supply chain in the US....
I had an interesting problem at work the other day. One of our nightly ETL steps was returning this error: “The maximum system-generated unique value for a duplicate group was exceeded for index with partition ID . Dropping and re-creating the index may resolve this; otherwise, use another clustering key.” I admit it was something I had never seen before, so of course a quick trip to Google is in order....
Some of my thoughts for 2022 and what I want to get done: If I aim for a cello grade each year, my grade four exam will be coming up in May. However, my teacher has injured herself, and won’t be doing any more teaching this year. So, unless I can find a new teacher here on the Sunshine Coast, I know it will be difficult to pass this exam. I’m going to take another crack at a low-FODMAP diet for 8 weeks....
A couple of weeks before the December 2021 holidays, I attended a four day TOGAF training course. It was my introduction to Enterprise Architecture. The content was relatively interesting, and a very new perspective on things for me. I have always been involved in the nitty-gritty - creating reports, deploying dashboards, optimising code, implementing ETL. To think about the architecture rather than the actual construction was…refreshing. The actual Open Group framework we studied doesn’t sit that well with me....