I saw this write up about the built in ability to both restore to factory settings as well as just refresh (basically a clean install but preserves your data). It’s not a dumb idea, it solves a common problem that has been already a long time. Way way back when… Read more

I’ve managed to get by for more than 3 years with the original 64G SSD in my laptop, but lately I found myself having to prune things to keep getting by. Pruning isn’t bad, actually good to do, but a pain to be forced into it. I decided to look… Read more

It’s been quite a while – where did the time go? – since I had done a presentation for oPASS, so when I heard in December that our planned January speaker had cancelled I was happy to volunteer to fill in. The presentation they picked was the one I… Read more

Yesterday Bill Graziano announced the appointment of two Directors (Kendal Van Dyke and James Rowland-Jones) to fill vacancies on the PASS Board (one vacated by me as of Dec 31st, and one vacated by Douglas McDowell moving into the VP Finance position).

I am unhappy with that decision.

The… Read more

I’m stepping out of blogging-break mode for a few minutes to share that I’ll be presenting Building Your Professional Development Plan to the members of oPASS on January 10, 2012. It’s obviously not a technical presentation, but one that has always been well received by technical audiences and one that… Read more

The 2011 Election results were just posted, congratulations to Adam Jorgensen, Denise McInerney, and Rob Farley for taking the top three positions and earning a two year term on the Board. Thanks to Kendal Van Dyke, Sri Sridharan, and Geoff Hiten for being candidates this year – I hope… Read more

I’m writing this on December 17th, thinking back on 2011, and it has been a good year. Not always simple or going where I thought it would go, but a good year. 2012 will bring more change as I finish my current work project in April or so and decide… Read more

Next week marks the end of my third and final year serving on the PASS Board of Directors. I’ve struggled to write this, to find the right focus, and in the end decided to write just a few thoughts that keep coming to the forefront for me.

I’ll start by… Read more

My presentation on Professional Development Plans ended up being ranked 47th out of 190, with an overall score of 4.63. The range is 1-5 with 5 being good, but it’s also a game of inches. If my score had been 4.5 I would have dropped to 90th place. Solidly in… Read more

I wrote a while back about my coffee cup from SQLSaturday #100. I took it to work (where I usually use my #49 cup) and while waiting on a meeting to start was showing it to a colleague (who isn’t a SQL guy). He was mildly interested, asking what SQLSaturday… Read more

Looking at 2011 and the planned events so far for 2012 it’s easy to see that SQLSaturday is starting to catch on in many places beyond the US, including Brazil that I mentioned in a post yesterday. Have you thought about what means? Why is it happening now? What would… Read more

Here’s a great post from Karla Landrum about her trip (with husband Rodney) to Brazil for the milestone making #100. What a terrific adventure and great story (now if only Karla would blog more…!).

Rodney & Karla were kind enough to bring me back a gift from the event,… Read more

It’s not uncommon to have information shared in a Word doc, but I was surprised recently to open one up and glance down to see the page counter clicking away..100…200..all the way up to 2000. I’m not sure what the maximum is (or if there is a limit), but 2000… Read more

Yesterday I shared the small adventure of buying a refurbished laptop. While I was at Compusa looking at laptops I browsed the rest of the store too, just seeing what they had that I didn’t know I needed yet, and that led me to the TV aisle. I’d been thinking… Read more

A couple months back the laptop my wife uses was fading away, the internal power connector was broken/barely working and it looked like a motherboard swap would be required. Out of warranty and at $150+ for the motherboard (plus some aggravation), time to buy something new. It’s used for browsing,… Read more

I haven’t been to a MagicPASS meeting in a while, so it was nice to reconnect with the group at Orlando Brewing this past Thursday evening. It’s in downtown Orlando, a bit removed from the normal meeting place, but for two good reasons:

• It’s a working brewery
• You can bring…

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The Shredder Challenge was a contest sponsored by DARPA to find ways of putting shredded documents back together. Take a minute to look at the puzzle and solutions. Interesting stuff.

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My first outing of the new year will be at the IT Pro Camp here in Orlando, working on some tweaks to my presentation on Professional Development Plans. The full schedule has been posted. I’m looking forward to this event!

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Ran across this during my daily reading, a post by Jeff Stibel on Why I Hire People That Fail. The post is worth reading just for that, but the piece that caused me to flag it to share was his mention of his failure wall. He’s posted a large… Read more

One of our small holiday traditions is that we bake at least one home made dessert. Hard to beat the price on buying things like pumpkin pie at the store, so we try to make something that is fun, different, or hard to find. Or perhaps all three. This year… Read more