A New Form of Address: Mx

Posted on October 22, 2021 by way0utwest

When I was presenting at the dataMinds Connect conference, I called on someone in the audience. At the time, I called on someone raising their hand and said something like, “yes, miss.”.

I got dinged in feedback for assuming someone is a he or she.

At first I wasn’t sure how to take this, but like much of life, I decided to try and learn something. I set aside my feelings and started to look at how I’d address the individual in the future.

I should have asked then, but I didn’t think about it. I keep my “he/him” pronouns on my bio slide, and I’m happy to refer to someone as he, she, or they, as they prefer. It’s a simple thing and I look for the forms of address in other people’s slides and signatures.

However, I’ve grown up with sir, madam, miss, and other forms of addressing someone I don’t know well. I’ve always considered is polite to say sir or miss.

That’s not good enough for the current world and I learned there is a title: Mx. According to a few sources, this is pronounced mooks, as rhyming with books.

Something new for me to think about as I call on people. Certainly I should ask, though asking everyone seems like overkill. Certainly, however, if I’m not sure, I ought to ask.

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Complex Searching

Posted on October 22, 2021 by way0utwest

Searching for data in our systems is sometimes hard. If you’ve ever needed to generically search a lot of text, it’s not easy to write code to do this in an efficient manner. It’s even harder if you try to embed this in an application. If you get into full-text searching, likely you would look beyond SQL Server as the built in full-text indexing and searching isn’t great.

What if you had to search in more complex data? Imagine that your users were looking for words in audio files, or they wanted to find images that matched other images. Those are even more complex searches, and I expect that few people have had to deal with this. I know some, and I do expect it to be something customers will do demand across time.

I saw an article about Google Lens coming to the desktop, allowing you to clip an image and then search for similar items. While I haven’t used this for searching, my kids have. Often they are looking for matches of a product or a place, and they like being able to search for related images. Image search is interesting, as you are looking to match patterns of numbers, but not exact matches. The idea of fuzzy matching parts of an image, which is a series of numeric values, but not all of the values, has to be a very challenging process. I would find this even more complex than doing a speech-to-text translation from audio and searching for words. Many of us would know how to do produce a solution for searching audio recordings.

The theory of how to search for images based on another image is a complex field of study. I don’t pretend to know how this might work, and I’m not sure I care. If I have a need for this, I wouldn’t expect to need to understand how the system works as this would really be an API call of some sort. I might need to work with the API and understand how to better use it to produce the results my clients need, but that might be the most I’d care about.

As with a lot of deeply technical things, I care more about practical applications. On a recent trip, I watched my wife use Google Lens to translate some menus, something I hadn’t considered. I usually would type in text and look for meanings, but using the image is much easier. I expect we’ll see the need for more complex searches in the future, but for most of us, it will be another service we consume without really understanding how it works, which is probably fine in these situations.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Daily Coping 22 Oct 2021

Posted on October 22, 2021 by way0utwest

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 reflect on what you accomplished this week.

I’m going back a week, mostly because this is a busy week and I don’t know I’ll get to get organized in my thoughts on Thursday.

Last week, 11 Oct-17 Oct, I was doing a lot. The first part of the week was in Belgium at the first live work conference in nearly two years for me. It was great. I met people, chatted about all sorts of things from how the event ran to what some people did in their jobs. I delivered a presentation, networked with speakers and attendees, and got to enjoy some amazing Belgian beer.

I was back in Cambridge, UK on Wednesday, where I went to the office and had a few meetings. A hectic day, especially as I was trying to prep for work Thur. A great dinner with a friend as well, but a late night. That’s 3 in a row.

Thursday was recording a series of interviews for the PASS keynote. This was surprisingly difficult to do, helping the people focus and answer questions, sit in a not-very-comfortable chair all day, take after take. 8 hours of recording and then a team dinner. I fell into bed at 8.

Friday was also hectic, a few meetings, trying to get the final face time with people before leaving.

Saturday was travel, so I didn’t do much, but I did read a few books on the trip. Total for the pandemic limited 2021, 97 so far.

Sunday I got back to yoga class, cut some grass, and coached some volleyball.

It was a lot of stuff, a bit too much, as I ended up getting run down, feeling as though I’m fighting a cold after too little sleep and too long days. I used to handle busy weeks like this better in the past, but I’m getting older. I need to learn to slow down a bit, which is my big reflection.

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Daily Coping 21 Oct 2021

Posted on October 21, 2021 by way0utwest

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 ask for help to overcome an obstacle.

I hate asking for help. I really struggle with it. Work appreciates that, but my wife sometimes gets on me to share with her and the family.

I’m working on it.

I had some chores to do recently, which I could have easily done. Well, not easily, but I likely wouldn’t have hurt myself. Mostly, I’m just slower by myself. I took time to ask my son to help. He’s happy to do it; I just needed to ask and schedule it with him.

It was nice to work on something together, and it went quicker. Hopefully it survives for a few years.

20210911_134219

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