T20 cricket, played over three hours, has become the sport’s most popular format underlined by the sprouting of franchise leagues globally headed by the billion-dollar Indian Premier League.

It’s also been deemed the ‘growth engine’ for the global development of the sport highlighted by a new cashed-up T20 franchise league in the U.S. set to start in 2023.

But there are those pushing for an even shorter and sharper version of the game, believing it can appeal to those weened on soccer’s 90-minute playing time and better suit declining attention spans.

The T10 format, played over 90 minutes, has started to spread forcing the sport’s gatekeepers to start making decisions over whether to legitimise it. The arrival of the Abu Dhabi T10 league in 2017 led to widespread sneering with cynics believing this supercharged version was starting

Read More

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one I took on the road.

  • Chatsonic – Chatsonic is a new way to create content, easily and quickly. You can chat with your computer, giving it commands in plain English. It’s like ChatGPT, but better!
  • Chron – Cron is a next-generation calendar for professionals and teams. It streamlines workflows, integrates other productivity tools, and builds collaboration right into your calendar. Cron is helping make the modern workspace more efficient.
  • Readitfor.me – is the world’s leading book summary service for executives and entrepreneurs who want to stay on top of the latest
Read More
Incremental-Refresh-in-Power-BI-Part-1-Implementation-in-Power-BI-Desktop

Incremental refresh, or IR, refers to loading the data incrementally, which has been around in the world of ETL for data warehousing for a long time. Let us discuss incremental refresh (or incremental data loading) in a simple language to better understand how it works.

From a data movement standpoint, there are always two options when we transfer data from location A to location B:

  1. Truncation and load: We transfer the data as a whole from location A to location B. If location B has some data already, we entirely truncate the location B and reload the whole data from location A to B
  2. Incremental load: We transfer the data as a whole from location A to location B just once for the first time. The next time, we only load the data changes from A to B. In this approach, we never truncate B.
Read More

Over the last few years, consumers have been practicing more conscious drinking, whether that’s abstaining, sipping low-proof drinks or tiger-striping — switching between no-alcohol drinks and regular-strength drinks,

In 2022, sales of no- and low-alcohol beverages grew by more than 7% in volume across 10 key global markets, surpassing $11 billion in market value. This is up from $8 billion shown in 2018, according to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis.

The pace of growth is expected to surpass that of the last four years, continuing at a CAGR of 7%, compared to a CAGR of 5% between 2018 and 2022.

“The dynamic no/low-alcohol category presents opportunities for incremental sales growth as consumers are recruited from drinks categories such as soft drinks and water” comments Susie Goldspink, Head of No-

Read More

Many people seem to take residential and commercial painting as the same service, even though they’re entirely different. After all, painting is painting, regardless of where or what you paint. No! It’s not that simple.

There are specific differences between commercial and residential painting. Herein, we’ll dive into the world of decorating and painting in commercial and residential environments.

Size Of Project

Painting a commercial or residential property are two different jobs, requiring different skill sets and tools. Painting a commercial space such as an airport, office space, hospital, shopping centre, or any other commercial space is complicated by the increased square footage you’re dealing with. Additionally, you have to contend that the workspace may be affected by inventory, employees, and customers.

Size Of Team

Typically, you need a higher number of painters to paint the required space and also meet deadlines. This means you have to make extensive plans …

Read More

Marketing Podcast with Jenn Herman

Jenn Herman, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jenn Herman. Jenn is a social media consultant, speaker, and globally recognized Instagram expert. She is a sought-after international speaker providing tips, resources, and training for organizations of all sizes that need to structure their social media strategies. She is the co-author of Instagram for Dummies 2.0 (2022) Edition.

Key Takeaway:

Instagram is a powerful tool for companies of any size to make connections with potential customers and promote their products. With over two billion people logging in monthly, if you haven’t already hopped on the bandwagon, now’s the time! In this episode, Jenn Herman and I chat about the current tactics that work on Instagram and the guidelines that you should keep in mind.

Questions I ask Jenn Herman:

  • [1:21] Why did you feel like you needed a new edition to your
Read More
Content Endorsement in Power BI, Part 2, Endorsing Contents

In the previous post I explained the basic concepts around content endorsement in Power BI. We discussed that users’ ability to collaborate in creating and sharing content is one of the key aspects of users’ experience in Power BI. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to identify the quality of the content without a mechanism to identify the content quality in large organisations. Content endorsement is the answer to this challenge. We discussed the following in the previous post:

In this post, I explain the following:

How do Power BI administrators enable certification and grant rights to security groups?

In the previous post, we discussed that a Power BI administrator must enable certification and grant sufficient rights to the security groups. Therefore, all members of the specified security group are authorised to certify the content. If you are a Power BI administrator, follow these steps to do so:

Read More

It’s nearly Christmas, which is what I’m blaming for my current woes: PC problems.

I think my main PC is jealous because I was considering building a new one. I’m eyeing all these newer components—the latest and greatest CPUs and GPUs (pricey!)—and getting a bit carried away since my current gaming rig is perfectly fine. Or was fine.

This weekend it started acting out. I’ve had to fire up a different machine to type this post because it won’t go past the BIOS screen and also won’t let me press the key that takes me into the BIOS, which means I’m basically stuck. Really not sure how to resolve a boot issue if I can’t access Windows or the BIOS!

I don’t need this crap right now!

In any case, let’s do this Wordle and then I can get back to

Read More

OData has been adopted by many software solutions and has been around for many years. Most solutions are using the OData is to serve their transactional processes. But as we know, Power BI is an analytical solution that can fetch hundreds of thousands (or millions) rows of data in a single table. So, obviously, OData is not optimised for that kind of purpose. One of the biggest challenges many Power BI developers face when working with OData connections is performance issues. The performance depends on numerous factors such as the size of tables in the backend database that the OData connection is serving, peak read data volume over periods of time, throttling mechanism to control over-utilisation of resources etc…

So, generally speaking, we do not expect to get a blazing fast data refresh performance over OData connections, that’s why in many cases using OData connections for analytical tools such as

Read More

Italian sticker company Panini have made their first foray into women’s club soccer after announcing their Spanish division, Panini Cromos will release a collection for the Spanish top flight, the Primera División de la Liga de Fútbol Femenino, known as Liga F.

After the success of similar women’s soccer collections for international tournaments, Spain has stolen a march on some of its European rivals by launching the first Panini sticker album for a national women’s league which will no doubt lead to demand for similar collections in other countries.

The agreement between Panini and Liga F begins this season and will initially run until the 2026/2027 campaign

Read More