I was just looking at the schedule for Houston, an amazing 10 tracks for this event on April 21, 2012. I’ll be doing two presentations, one on professional development plans and another on SQL security for developers. This will be my first time at the Houston SQLSaturday and really looking… Read more

Recently I suffered through a frustrating and contentious meeting, and that was stressful. I needed a walk, a few minutes to sort out why I was stressed, but instead I had to step right into another meeting. It was a follow up meeting to build out an implementation plan for… Read more

It’s not fair. I hear it a couple times a day. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not, but it’s how they feel and that is real enough. The first thing I do is listen, because that’s the first thing they need. Once they’ve explained (vented!) then I can tell them… Read more

One thing I’ve learned is that even losing one hour of sleep or just not sleeping well degrades my ability to handle stress. It feels wimpy to say that, I should be able to handle losing an hour of sleep! Maybe I’ll get to a point where it won’t, but… Read more

If I had to tell you that one thing I’ve gotten better at in the past 5 years it would be having a much higher awareness of when and how things stress me. I’ve made a lot of progress in handling stress, but you can only do that if you… Read more

Take a look at your network right now and while it probably has some diversity, I bet it’s tied pretty closely to what you do right now. That make sense, right? You meet people that are in the same line of work because those are the blogs you read, the… Read more

A few weeks ago I started clearing space for a small garden. Tedious work due to the area of the yard I picked, tons of some ugly vine that took hours to remove. I built four mini raised beds by using some 1x4” fence pickets and a small block of… Read more

Something fun for Friday, this was a gift from the client I work with to lighten things up and do some stress relief – punch it and it comes right back up. It sits on a table in the corner when I’m in the room, but I’ve taken to putting… Read more

One of the things I hear a lot relating to work big and small is that it is “almost done”, with a close relative “basically done”, often spoken as they reach for the marker to cross of an item on the task list. I can appreciate that it’s useful to… Read more

Here’s a story from a recent meeting. We were discussing some problems and the team was talking through some options that were very interesting, technically good, just not ones that could get done for a variety of reasons. It’s frustrating to be in that position, seeing at least a “better”… Read more

I was back at MagicPASS last week to do a presentation, my first time with the group at the new site (Disney Vacation Club). Great facility. Plenty of parking, accessible (at least if you live on the South side of Orlando!), good room. Actually 3 rooms. One that they used… Read more