Here’s a niche idea that someone might have some fun with, build a site where someone can request some or all of the various laptop stickers out there with one request. Capture the request and send it off to the various vendors. A more advanced implementation might be to do… Read more

I’ll be visiting the Space Coast group (http://spacecoast.sqlpass.org/) on Feb 9th to do a presentation on Professional Development Plans. I’m looking forward to the visit. Always fun to talk about professional development and some of what I’ll be presenting is ideas for the planned “part two” I hope… Read more

I’ve had making home made ice cream on my list of things to try for a while, since watching an episode of Good Eats. Just never got to it as kid, seemed like a good thing to do now with my own children. I spent all of 5 minutes browsing… Read more

The Idera ACE program is something I’ve been involved with for over a year now. I’ll share a bit of the back story, and some thoughts on how the idea has grown and morphed since then.

Back in late 2010 I had a couple conversations with David Fargo and Heather… Read more

The call for applications is open today, a chance for six lucky people to do more in the SQL community for a year. Idera will sponsor your travel to a few events in the US, invite you to do webcasts that often have 1000+ attendees, and work with you to… Read more

I tried this out – Change.org that is – recently as part of a post about PASS and wanted to post a few comments about the experience.

Setting up a petition was very easy and they do a good job of walking you through the process. The total time is… Read more

Good discussion of how USB charging works.

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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