Week 17, 2024

This week I had the grateful opportunity of watching an exclusive webinar about Data Literacy, presented exclusively to the employees of the company I work for, by the amazing Priscila Papazissis, head of Data Analytics at the French company Vallourec.

Digital Transformation is a buzzword more than ever nowadays, and among the many concepts it brings along, there's that of data culture, the importance data plays in the business longevity and results. But despite that particular concept being repeated over and over by many people I've had the opportunity to talk, it wasn't until Priscila's talk this week that I could see Data Literacy in practice. It was eye-opening, and I got really energized to study the matter further.

I'm helping two interns in our team with their college graduation project, which involves Digital Transformation, and I immediately called them to watch the webinar. The results quickly showed up: we have advanced an important part of their research, related to data culture. This made me feel specially satisfied with mentoring this week.

I have recently changed my Japanese learning strategy. I'm still using the tools I mentioned in the previous weeks, that is, my Renshuu Pro lifetime subscription, my year of Kanshudo Pro and my lifetime subscription of HelloTalk in order to engage with native Japanese and talk — but last week I mentioned I was starting to feel anxiety build up.

Anxiety is never a good thing, neither for me, nor for anyone. So I reviewed my plans and came to the conclusion I was stepping too hard on the gas, and then implemented a slower pace. I still study everyday now, but applied some kaizen principles and have restricted my kanji and vocabulary learning to those terms that are part of Minna no Nihongo's book one, chapter one, which vocabulary is provided by jpdb.io, a fantastic (and free) Japanese learning resource with mnemonics and a very good SRS algorithm.

The only problem this week was that I fell behind on my Diários de japonês posts, the last one published on April, 19th.

But... I had a very good reason for that delay.

As part of a dental treatment I'm undergoing, I needed to pass through a gum surgery this week. That proved to be both painful and longer than expected to finish. I spent two days with very low energy and a sore throw as resulting side effects, and to be honest, almost thought about not publish this week's notes, as I'm still a little achy, even under the dentist's prescribed medication. Fortunately, I'm writing them, meaning I'm at least a little better.

Next week, as the pain is certainly going to fade away (3 to 4 days of such pain are expected, until next Friday I'll be back to the dentist's office to remove gum stitches), I hope to be able to publish a couple more of the “Diários” posts.

Finishing this week's notes, I'm happy to say we've talked to my son in Japan and he keeps doing fine in college, and increasingly adapting to the people, routine me and country. That kind of news can certainly relieve my gum pain — at least a little 😊