Update Week 24 2025
I don’t ever do weekly updates, I don’t know why I’m starting now. This is the first and could be the last, we shall see.
Reading
I gave up on The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, after reading the first hundred pages or so. It’s a huge book and I just wasn’t grabbed by it. I very rarely put books down instead of finishing them, in this case being over 1000 pages I didn’t want to commit any more time into right now.
So, rather than get much deeper into what I’m sure really is a good story I picked up the 4th book of The Wheel of Time series which is The Shadow Rising… I know also a huge ass book. But I’ve read the first 3 and really enjoyed them, and now that Amazon dropped the series I feel more comfortable putting the time in to read them.
Something about the differences in the plot lines, and events between the books and the series made my memory shortcircut and I stopped being able to remember what happened in the book and what happened on the show. Now that I won’t have both story lines playing in my head I should be able to keep the story straight.
I had a goal of reading 12 books this year. A lot to some people, almost none to others… It would’ve been about on par for me. Instead I’m going to attempt to finish the entire Wheel of Time series or a good chunk of it by the end of the year.
Plus! Bonus, the last few books were written by Sanderson so maybe I’ll be a little more ready to dip back into his worlds after I’ve completed The Wheel of Time.
Don’t send me any hate mail about how much you love Brandon Sanderson. I do too. I thouroughly enjoyed the first three Mistborn novels and have the other three buried someplace deep in my reading list, and I’m sure they’ll make it to the top one day.
Change of heart on AI
I’m generally a big AI or LLM, or whatever you want me to call it, hater. But two things have happened recently that have changed my mind a little bit.
The first is Splunk, the second is Excel.
Splunk
I’ve never been great at writting Splunk searches. Something about the syntax just never clicked with me. It feels like some kind of dark magic. I’ve always feared going too deep into the Splunk rabbit hole would cost me my soul at some point when a devil showed up to collect.
Which brings me back to AI. I haven’t written a Splunk query in at least a month, and hope I never will again.
Ever since I was given access to my companies internal copilot, I just open the chat window and feed it a paragraph or two describing what I want to find and it spits out a query that just works.
It’s like magic, and it might still cost me my soul. But learning how to ask Copilot to find shitty shit in Splunk is much easier than learning how to ask Splunk to find shitty shit in Splunk.
I’m sure the queries are not optimal and cost a fuck ton of money to run - but they work and that’s all I care about. The Splunk team can help me make adjustments down the road if they end up caring about it, but I doubt they do.
Excel
If I ever hated anything more than I hated AI, it was Microsoft Excel. I would rather export anything to a csv and spend 5 days writting a Python program to extract the information I want than spend 30 minutes learning how to write an Excel formula.
In a truely marvelous twist of fate AI also sucks at Excel, and this makes me happy. But it sucks just a little bit less at it than I do.
When I ask Copilot to help me write a formula, it’s usually close enough to being right that I can see how to fix it pretty quickly. But importantly, it’s also wrong enough that I don’t feel like a complete jackass for not being able to figure it out on my own. It’s nice ego boost.
It makes me happy that a super intelligent computer also (apparently) thinks Excel is a complex mess that shouldn’t exist.
Unfortuanatly, you can’t work at most places without having to interact with Excel on at least a semi regular basis, and since I like money I have to put up with it. Even being hidden deep in the bowels of the server room…. or my house since I work from home, I still can’t hide completely from spreadsheets. But now I can share the pain with ChatGPT, or Copilot, or whatever the AI flavor of the day is.