Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Bon Jovie is the Band. You Mean Bon Jovi's Monster

2023-Jul-31

Aluh akbar! My nerves have calmed. I passed my Spark Developer Associate Certification exam from Databricks. I was well prepared for it yet I was incensed with apprehension. Nothing some careful breathing couldn’t handle, yet my nerves were definitely in need of assuaging. It felt like the butterflies in my stomach I would get the night before the semi-annual PFT I would have to perform in the Navy. I was always way above the 70% threshold for passing those or this exam. That comfortable margin does not matter. When the stakes are high, I’ll always have some discomfort before the deciding moment.

No update to report. If I were to make some development commitments now, I would focus on making a clear web design to channel the data I have available in some sort of plan. Right now my plan is coming up with some templating that occasionally matches the URL schema. I might explore using that Kimbal stuff I’ve been reading to make some very very modest data modeling tables that will live side by side with the four transaction tables that are the heart of fredlambuth.com. Will Spark be involved? Probably not. Especially if I find a day job with steady Spark work.

I finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Frankly I scanned through the last hundred pages of this +600 page behemoth. I read the plot summary on the wiki page. Worked backwards from the last page to see if anything grabbed me. Nope. I enjoyed the carefully laid Ethiopian settings or the very anatomically verbose description of medical procedures. Both of those were lacking in what ended with the doctor narrator trying to reconcile with his doctor father who abandoned him at the end of the first act.

Earlier I painted the Ghosh character as a breath of fresh air among the medical practicing characters because he was less than idealistic. Although he had a more workmanlike approach to learning medicine, he turned out to be a true paragon of goodness like everybody else. The author just could not resist having a doctor in his story that was not a noble soul. I suppose this incredible doctor abandoning the narrator and needing a reconciliation means he was not a ‘good’ character. I sure could use the next fiction piece I read to have a bunch of unsavory sorts.