Yay, nice fall weather and a month dedicated to delightfully scary stuff. We started our month of horror movie watching this weekend with 1985’s Fright Night (we’d never seen it) and We Need to Talk about Kevin. Fright Night is delightfully bad. Chris Sarandon makes a good sexy vampire, I must say. Knowing that Amanda Bearse came out of the closet a few years later makes her dippy 80’s-girlfriend performance more amusing. And what was up with Evil Ed? That performance is just bananas. Roddy McDowall is lovely, of course.
Kevin had been sitting around my watchlist for years. It was good in that it was effective – great sense of dread all the way through. But I can’t say that I enjoyed it. So many questions – why didn’t they get themselves into therapy from the get-go? Why wasn’t little Kevin in school? Why the hell didn’t Tilda get the hell out of town once she was alone, rather than staying there where everyone hates her?
We’ll pick up an hour-long scary TV show once we finish Broadchurch and we’ll sub in Twilight Zone episodes for our half-hour slot.
How about them politics, huh? Nothing to say there except “Who could have seen this coming? Oh, oh, I know, EVERYONE.”
I’ve now been at the job for two months and have real honest-to-god work to do now – quite a lot of it actually. Oscillate being freaked out because I’m handed something I really just don’t know how to do, and being happy because I figured it out. For instance, I’m doing a lot more database-querying than I’ve ever done before. This is a good thing – I’ve always wanted to do more database stuff – but of course I have to figure out basic stuff every time. (and then put it in my notes so I don’t have to figure it out the next time). This week I had to do Salesforce queries, which involve SOQL, which is like SQL but different, and there are far less resources on the internet for how it works. Luckily, as I’ve said before, my teammates are actually nice and willing to help. It’s a real culture thing there, and boy, am I happy about that.
Oh, sadness, but our past president passed away last week a few weeks after stepping down (because of ‘health issues’). I’d never had a chance to meet her, but judging by the testimonials in our all-hands meeting on Friday, she was universally well-loved. What a shame.
Still studying for the damn certification. A knowledge area a day, reviewing the basics and my previous wrong answers, then taking a practice drill. I passed the first two with flying colors, then did surprisingly badly on the one yesterday, grr. Ah well. I’m also creating a cheat sheet of all the techniques referenced – there are 50 – a list of them, and just the purpose and the description. I’m hoping this will help me remember the difference between, say, a data dictionary and data modeling, or between a glossary and a concept model.
Part of the problem I have is since I am in fact an experienced business analyst, sometimes I disagree with the answers and the book. That’s frustrating. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’ve already worked out why it’s better to just get this test done than to keep pounding away at this material until I’m 100% confident – because what they’re testing is specific and picky knowledge from a book that I’m not allowed to reference during the test, but would certainly always have at hand in real life. My basic grasp of the material is sound – the questions I mess up are like ‘which of these very similar four lists of elements are the 8 elements we associate with this thing’. It’s dumb. One hope I have is that the practice tests (which are not created by the actual testing organization) are actually too picky and I may breeze through the actual test just fine. We shall see.
Anyway, it will be over one way or the other this Sunday afternoon and then, either way, I’ll probably go out for margaritas. So there’s that.
What happens after that? Back to house/life projects. I want to really learn this blogging platform better and maybe move my webpages over here. And, aware that, despite my best efforts, I could catch this possibly-deadly disease, I want to get my affairs (more) in order. And we have the holidays. That will take me to January, and then maybe I can start concentrating more on my physical and psychological wellness.
Enjoy your spookitime!
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