Happy Pi Day 2025

Last month, I attended a virtual Lunch & Learn session about Microsoft Copilot. The presenter explained to us how to get to Copilot on our corporate Microsoft tenant, then tasked each of us with writing a prompt to generate an image that we would then post to the Teams chat.

My first prompt, for whatever reason, involved me requesting a picture of a pie.

I immediately knew that my follow-up prompt had to request that the symbol for Pi be shown on the crust of the pie. The image above is the one I then posted to the Lunch & Learn Teams chat.

I intentionally waited until today to post about this, because Pi.

EPILOGUE: Before that Lunch & Learn session, I was underwhelmed with what I thought AI and Large Language Models could do for me. Since then, though, I’ve asked Copilot questions that are too complex for a simple Google search — mostly centering around DAX code optimization. The dozen or so “chats” I’ve had with Copilot have been enough to land me in the “heavy user” category within the IT department, and to get me an exclusive invite to the new “Copilot Champions” Teams Channel.

Copilot hits the nail on the head sometimes, but it’s often a little off the mark when it comes to the complex situations I need solved. It’s still better than beating my head against the wall or trying to figure out the exact phrasing and buzzwords to include in a Google search.

Nerding Out In My Free Time

I mentioned in a recent post that I rediscovered my camera collection when I was looking for a film camera to bring to Hocking Hills. That morphed into a side project to create a new version of the Cameras page I had in a previous iteration of my blog.

Thing is, my WordPress installation uses PHP as its programming language. I haven’t touched PHP since the last time I tried to customize my blog, which was many years ago. Granted, my job as a data nerd has meant I’ve gained some experience in other programming languages, but PHP is not one of them. Also, I haven’t had to touch CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for a Very Long Time, so I needed to refresh my knowledge of the possibilities there.

I managed to break my project into a bunch of bite-sized tasks that felt very Agile-esque.

  1. Create a custom tag page in WordPress.
  2. Retrieve the tag information.
    (Shoutout to Mobilize Cloud for their helpful post from 2016.)
  3. Display the tags as tiles, using an unordered list and some basic CSS.
  4. Link to each tag page.
  5. Display the number of posts for each tag.
  6. Display a photo of each camera (tag).
  7. Retrieve the date range a given tag was used.
    (This was the hard part, and required doing some research and flexing my SQL skillz.)
  8. Enter descriptions for each camera/tag in WordPress.

Next up is making sure my new page works as expected on mobile, uploading photos of all the cameras, and writing up descriptions. After that, I’m sure I’ll come up with some other bells and whistles I’d like to add….

In Lieu of a Review: 2022

I never did get around to writing a Year In Review last year.

I still collected all the data, still had things to say… just never managed to sit down and do it. For various reasons.

As I sat down to recap 2023, I felt (as I’d known I would) that I couldn’t summarize 2023 without at least acknowledging 2022. So, in lieu of a review, here are some screenshots from my 2022 roundup on Exist.io, where I aggregate all the things.

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