I’m trying to decide on what to do with my career for the next 15 years or so and I’m liking the idea of becoming an Azure administrator. It would be sort of poetic that my career started with Windows 95 certification and ends with Azure.

To that end I’ve completed the Describe Cloud Computing module and will keep moving forward with it.

Also completed Describe the benefits of using cloud computing.

So me and my (not so) newly minted degree have been job hunting and not sure which direction to take. At PDS I learned Taleo which served me well to the tune of over 7 figures over 10 years. It was a wonderful ride and I was saddened to see it go, but it had stagnated and despite the hit my career took, it was good to see Oracle loose a bunch of business because of the acquisition. At one time Taleo was in something like 64 of the Forbes top 100 companies, Oracle bought them and now that market share has been replaced by Workday. Good for them!!!

And it’s led to a boon for anyone that knows Workday integration. Alas, I do not. Nor do I have access to anyplace to learn it, it’s almost impossible to design a fluke like the one that got me into Taleo integration. But it seems Microsoft will come to my rescue again. This Azure platform is pretty cool and certification in it looks like a ticket back to the remote contractor or admin position I crave to move out to the middle of no-where. More to come as I figure out what the heck it actually is…

So the little bits and pieces of python I’ve learned are paying off. Today I managed to create the first workable TCC export rendered from the custom dictionary. I’m using ElementTree and I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing but it’s reading and rendering the XML properly and that’s probably the best measure of success. So now I should be able to create the config files as they are rendered XML also. I think now I’ll work on rendering the SQL for DB/table creation, that may be a little rough hewn but should work for warehouse purposes.

So unbeknown to me, you have to apply for graduation after you finish your last class. So long story short, I just got this email:

So it’s really over and I am officially a college graduate. Wow. Better late than never and I’m very thankful that was lucky enough to be in a situation where the only struggle I had in getting the degree was will power (ha ha).

We left out of DFW at 11:30pm on Thursday night, I had turned in my paper at 2pm earlier that day. It wasn’t perfect and was actually a little wordy and the video was 17 minutes. As we were driving through Mississippi at 8am my watch buzzed, I took my eye of the road for a split second to see what the message was and my eyes keyed in on two words, you passed…

I am now officially a college graduate!!!

Bachelor of Science, Data Management/Data Analytics

I’m almost done with the rewrite of the project to include commentary. Then I just have to write it up, do a video, submit and wait…

Scores finally caught up…

So yesterday I completed my Udacity Data Analyst Nanodegree, they were nice enough to give me a link to the certificate. I’ve submitted my scores and unfortunately I was denied a clean countdown because there’s no integration between Udacity and WGU, so here’s what my degree program looks like now:

I’m at the cusp of being finished with my degree, I’m working on an unsupervised machine learning class, and when I finish that there is only the 4 credit capstone project to knock out. With any luck, I’m finished by September.

I don’t ever want to play the part

Of a statistic on a government chart

The Police -1981

Tough luck, you are a statistic on a government chart, just hope you’re in the upper part of it.

I’m taking a statistics class and my eyes are crossing. If your selling point to get people to acquire knowledge is that you will now have a better idea of the probability of heads vs tails of 10 coins being flipped 5 times you really need a better point.

And then what’s with this Bayes Rule and its comparison to cancer and false vs positive tests. I mean we’re dealing with something so abstract why bring a deadly disease into it? You want my attention? Start showing me how this relates to something I wouldn’t mind running across, like Vegas gambling odds on various games or how to handicap the ponies given their previous record damnit, something I may actually give a flying flip about…