I think I’ve met my goal of blogging every day. I’m at almost 800 posts now over the past 2.5 years and forcing myself to write something every day has been useful. I won’t say that what I write every day is note worthy, but it’s practice, both in writing… Read more

I had a student recently who said that to get any type of training she had to write a proposal and get it approved first. I think that’s interesting, because it’s useful to make an employee learn to build a business case for an expense, especially one that has an… Read more

Funny the things you don’t think about until you hear someone doing it a different way. In this case it was at the December oPASS meeting and Kendal Van Dyke was talking entering business cards he had gathered at PASS and how long it took. I remarked that I’ve stopped… Read more

I ran across Scratch in a PC World article a while back. It’s a free download from MIT, and is primarily a drag and drop programming environment. You can do if/then, loops, and it also supports sprites for animation. There are a bunch (thousands) of projects you can download to… Read more

Hope you’re enjoying a break from the routine and spending quality time with family. Xmas for me is a time for music, so I thought I’d share another of my favorites, You Make It Feel Like Christmas by Neil Diamond. Read more

Happened to channel surf across this on TV, found the list - http://blog.vh1.com/2009-04-01/100-greatest-one-hit-wonders-of-the-80s-read-the-list-2/. Many of the links seem to point to videos that ‘aren’t there right now’, but maybe fixed by the time you read this. Easy to poke fun at one hit wonders, but never having had a… Read more

Have not tried this yet, but had it bookmarked to share, the TruLink Wireless USB to VGA will send video signals 30 feet. Not far, but far enough for an instructor machine to connect to a projector, or maybe from a PC in a closet to a monitor used for… Read more

I’m perusing things I’ve in the ‘blog about someday’ category of my list and found this one – a very nice PDF from Quest Software that has a ton of shortcuts for Management Studio. Free is good, and sometimes just finding the one shortcut can make the download and reading… Read more

I was reminded of this again recently during a class when the students exchanged cards and one student didn’t have them – the company didn’t provide them. Now yes, I think professionals should have cards and if your employer doesn’t provide them (and maybe even if they do), it’s a… Read more

It’s interesting to listen when DBA’s get together, there is always a story or two about the evil that developers do. I think we tend to get the victim mindset some, because certainly we have limited control over how many things are done and then feel like we’re held accountable… Read more

Most companies do something at the holidays, although it seems to be less with each year, and certainly this holiday and the previous year have happened under economic storm clouds. I’ve seen companies that give out turkeys on Thanksgiving, $50 in lieu of turkey - which seems more practical to… Read more

Ran across this post from Mark Russinovich titled The Machine SID Duplication Myth that seems to debunk the idea that SIDs need to be changed when cloning a machine. That isn’t to say that there isn’t work that has to be done via Sysprep or similar, but apparently the SID… Read more

SQLSaturday #37 will be held March 13, 2010 at Mandeville Hall, St. Joseph's University, 5600 City Line Ave, Philadelphia, PA. The event is being coordinated by Vince Napoli, Melissa Demsak, and Sharon Dooley. Details at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/37/eventhome.aspx. Read more

I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog.

It’s December already? 2009 seems to have gone by altogether… Read more

I had a question from a member of our local user group about options to get a legal copy of SQL Server to try to learn more. Those of us in the business tend to have access to just about whatever we need in terms of software and forget what… Read more

John Baldwin and Morgan Smith are going to repeat in Birmingham this year on Mar 27. They’ve got a great facility and Birmingham is a very nice area, if you’re thinking to travel to one I highly recommend this one – great hosts!

John Sterrett is hosting #36 in Wheeling… Read more

In Update #20 I mentioned that I was hoping to get the chapters portfolio for 2010. A few weeks have gone by and I can give you a preliminary update on where that stands. I had the opportunity to chat again with Rushabh on last Wednesday about his proposed assignments… Read more

My friend Ryan Duclos just sent me a reminder about the upcoming Alabama Code Camp on January 23, 2010, in Mobile, AL (not far from Pensacola). The call for speakers is still open. I’m already committed for that weekend, but if you’re in the area hope you’ll consider attending. Especially… Read more

I’m closing in on vacation – finally – and one of the things I’ll have in the back of my head while I’m re-energizing is deciding what I want to do next year. I’ve been a trainer for over three years now, and most of the time it’s fun and… Read more

We started off our end of year meeting with our standard networking meet and greet. It’s going smoother, people are getting to know each other and so also are getting back at making new people feel welcome. Nothing special, just asking everyone to try to meet anyone new, and to… Read more