Neal Waterstreet

Archives for March 2013

Healthcare class on Coursera

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I signed up for Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act on Coursera. It looks to be a good overview of the current state of healthcare in the US. The course is eight weeks long and has a different focus each week. The instructor for the course is Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel from Penn.

The format is simple: there are several video lectures and reading assignments each week, with a message board for interacting with other students. It looks like there is a QA video session every week where the instructor answers questions posted on the message board.

I am just getting started with the class and watching the lectures. I will update as it moves along. Eight weeks goes by quickly!

Oh, did I mention that it is free?

Cutting the cable cord…

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I finally decided to cancel my cable service and go with streaming services. We looked at what we really watch and found that it can easily be replaced. Football is going to be the only problem and I am still looking for a solution for that.

Now that I the service was going away, I needed to figure out what to replace it with. For hardware, I looked into a few options for a DIY HTPC. There are a lot of options there and the cost can be very low. The downside to me was that the DVR features don’t appear all that great. I got used to being able to record on a channel while watching another with my old service. It looks like this requires multiple cards which could add to the cost. I also thought about getting a Tivo, but I didn’t want the monthly contract since that was one of the reasons I did this in the first place.

Instead of a HTPC, I purchased a Roku and OTA antenna. Roku adds new channels regularly and is a much simpler alternative to a HTPC. The model I bought has both USB and Plex support. The OTA antenna was very inexpensive and was easily installed in the attic. I just used the cable wire to connect it to the TV. The channels look much better than I was used to. The antenna receives about 25 channels, but that is OK since we will only watch 5 or 6. If not having a DVR becomes a problem I may look into it, there are some other services out there. Another option is to convert an old PC to a HTPC/DVR, but I think I have all I need at this point.

I made the call yesterday and had the service disconnected. I increased my internet speed to the next level up to help with streaming. It was easier to cancel than I expected and just need to drop the equipment in the mail. I’ve already received an email offering the same service for a drastically reduced rate, but it is too late.

DAX vs MDX Smackdown!

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Last Monday Damu Venkatesan and I presented DAX vs MDX Smackdown! to the Atlanta Microsoft BI group. I thought it went well, but could definitely use some tweaking. In fact, it may be worth it to overhaul the presentation and focus on DAX. Here are a few of my thoughts about the presentation:

  1. More needs to be added to establish the use of DAX. I didn’t do a good job with this and assumed everyone was familiar with the Tabular model.
  2. I showed all of the queries in SSMS, which confused some people. The resolution here is to build a PowerPivot report and show the result from there. Then I can take it into SSMS and show the end result in PowerPivot and finally Power View.
  3. I need to spend more time telling the story of each query. Some of this was due to technical issues, but I still need to improve here. Damu did a very good job with stories about the MDX queries.
  4. Make sure the entire environment is installed on my VM. I had multiple SSAS instances, but didn’t have Excel or SharePoint installed. This would have helped me to elaborate on several questions.

On the technical side there were issues too. My Lenovo had issues with the projector and I could only see on screen and not the laptop. This was also at a very low resolution, so all of my work setting up SSMS for readability was lost. I need to find a backup plan here and find out what other people are doing.

I’d also like to thank Teo Lachev for his help before, during and after the presentation.

All in all it went well. It is always easier to pick out what went wrong instead of what went well. I am looking forward to doing it again soon.