Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 28 Dec 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to congratulate someone for an achievement that may go unnoticed.

    I had a friend get accepted to speak at a conference. That happens all the time, and plenty of people get accepted. Plenty get rejected as well, but since I knew, I just sent a congrats to them.

  • End of the Year Stats

    I track some data from my life, some purposefully, some randomly from various services. Here are some areas to look back at this year.

    Reading

    I read a lot. It’s an escape for me from a busy life and a good hobby. I track my books on Goodreads and tag the ones I finish with the year in which I finish them. As of a couple days before Christmas, I was at 117 in the 2021 tag. Quite a bt of growth in books read:

    • 2021 – 117
    • 2020 – 82
    • 2019 – 128
    • 2018 – 79

    Before this I wasn’t tagging.

    Fitness

    I try to work out regularly. A few items from 2021

    • 328 workouts
    • 118,736 kcal burned
    • 225:32 hours working out
    • 319 miles of distance. Unfortunately yoga and weightlifting don’t cover distance Winking smile

    Not a great year, but not bad. I was hoping to be above 365. I tend to do do things on weightlifting days, so I’ve missed too many days this year.

    Music

    I love listening to music. I’ve had lots of music players, and went with an iPhone a few times specifically because the music support was better. These days I am mostly on Spotify, which is a fantastic service for me. It’s in the Tesla, on my devices, and I’ve got stuff playing often.

    I love the wrap up from Spotify this year. A few stats:

    • 33,449 minutes listening
    • Top song – 3 Nights (36 listens) (also Old Town Road, California Dreaming, Who Says, and Short Skirt)
    • Top artists – John Mayer (2,243 minutes), with Beatles, Jay-Z, Notorius BIG and Stevie Wonder rounding out the list.
    • Top genre – Classic Rock (lots of guitar riffs I like here)

    Language

    • 30,043 XP (experience points)
    • Top 1% of learners
    • French and Japanese
    • 5978 minutes learning (99.6 hours)
    • 85 minutes on one day
    • 1074 words learned, probably more Japanese
    • 334 days when the stats came, 575 days on a streak. I used 2 streak savers in 2021, 3 in 2020, so not really all those days.
    • 258 days in the Diamond league (top league)

    I got this icon/image/prize:

    2021-12-06 09_44_49-YEAR IN REVIEW

    Travel

    With the pandemic still going on and not many events, I didn’t think I’d travel much, but I ended up with a good year.

    • 12 trips for me
    • 1 new country (Belgium)
    • 1 UK trip
    • 3 trips to Florida
    • 5 work trips
    • 48 trips according to Google

    The spread in the US:

    2021-12-20 15_41_25-Timeline

    We ended up with 4 or 5 trips in the living quarters, camping out in various places.

    20210727_202028

    Not bad, and hoping for more in 2022.

    I also renewed my United 1K status. With a few trips and some promotions from them, I ended up back at the top tier that can be earned. That’s good as I hope to get back to more travel in 2022 and would prefer to get upgrades across the ocean.

  • Taking a Break

    That’s it for this year. I’m working today, but heading off on vacation with family for the rest of the week.

    It’s been a great year, and I look forward to 2022 starting next Monday.

  • Daily Coping 27 Dec 2021

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to appreciate kindness and thank people who do things for you.

    I get this a lot as a coach, and it’s always nice to hear kids thank me after every practice. It’s a nice sign this year, which I haven’t always had in the past. This is a good group of kids.

    For me, I keep seeing memes around this time of year that it costs you no money to say please and thank you, among other small things. I agree. I have made an effort to do this more, thanking the family for simple things, thanking my yoga instructors after every class, thanking service people for doing what they’d do anyway.