If you’re going to spend 3-5 days in Seattle at the PASS Summit it’s worth sampling the local food rather than sticking with the ‘safe’ chain choices. I enjoy Diners, Drive-In’s, and Dives on the Food Network, so I grabbed the list of restaurants they had featured from Seattle. Haven’t tried any of them, but hoping to try at least one on my next trip. Been to one of these, or have another you think I should try? Post a comment!
Voula's Offshore Cafe 658 NE. Northlake Way Seattle, WA 98105 Tel: (206) 634-0183 Website: www.voulasoffshore.com
Mike's Chili Parlor 1447 N.W. Ballard Way Seattle, WA 98107 Tel: (206) 782-2808
Bizzarro Italian Cafe 1307 N 46th Street Seattle, WA 98103 Tel: (206) 632-7277 Website: www.bizzarroitaliancafe.com
Slim's Last Chance 5606 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA, 98108 (206) 762-7900 Website: www.slimslastchance.com
Georgia's Greek Restaurant & Deli 323 NW 85th Street Seattle, WA 98117 Tel: (206)783-1228 Website: www.georgiasgreekrestaurant.com
Pam's Kitchen 5000 University Way NE Seattle, WA 98105 (206) 696-7010 Website: www.pams-kitchen.com
See his quiet post about it here. This comes right after finishing up his first book titled Protecting SQL Server Data, available as a free download from SSC. John is a great guy and I’m glad to see that his ongoing efforts in the SQL community have been rewarded.
Ever had a day when a bunch of small things run together to create a day you wish you had missed:
It’s a great example of stress. Any one of those alone is minor, a couple combined are frustrating, all together – wish I could rewind and try again!
I try to be balanced on new technology and ideas, trying to find the middle ground between hype and usefulness, time and money, fun and work. When Twitter first came out I didn’t pay a lot of attention besides my usual reading about what’s new, not being a blogger at the time and not having a need then for ‘micro-blogging’. Since then the world has changed, both for Twitter and for me. Twitter seems to have morphed into something beyond micro-blogging, what my friend Steve calls sidewalk conversations. And me, my job and interests have changed such that blogging is both fun and work, and I’m in the idea/thinking business, so reaching a larger audience both makes sense and appeals to my sense of trying to do better.
I’ve put it off for a while for a few reasons:
So while I’ve had reasons (and in truth have just enjoyed being stubborn about it!), all my friends seem to find value in it and I don’t see any of them as easily hypnotized (well, maybe one or two!). I’m at the beginning of a mental re-org, deciding what things to continue, what things to adds to my list, and importantly, what things will get removed next year. Should Twitter go on the list?
And by the way, the title isn’t a typo!
I’ve always thought it made sense for events; announcing last minute changes and adhoc meetups, reminders about upcoming events during the day, less certain about just day to day stuff. I’ve got two events coming up, SQLSaturday #21 and the PASS Summit, so I’ve had it in mind to try there anywhere – which means learning how the Twitter thing works. I’ll be doing some reading this week to try to learn the basics, and I’ll give it a try through the end of year and then write up more notes. As I do it, I’m going to try to understand more about it:
Ah, checking Twitter already are you? Sometime between now and Friday evening I’ll post something on Twitter. Something interesting? That remains to be seen!
Yesterday was a typical Florida afternoon, sudden down pour of rain, but not a storm. Just slow solid rain for about 45 minutes. Rain always seems to remind me to stop and take a break, watch the world go by a bit. That got me to thinking about having or not having a window and how much I value it.
My current office has windows running the length of it, from about 3.5 feet up to the ceiling. It’s a second floor office and the view is ok – looking out/down there are a few trees, but about 75 feet past that is a standard strip mall, and the backside at that. It’s a standing seam metal roof, and when it rains it’s mildly interesting, watching the water roll down in sheets. It’s mildly amusing too, as one of the stores in the strip mall is a bar, and on the roof on the back side (facing me) are three beer bottles. Always makes me wonder first, why some knucklehead would throw a bottle on the roof, and then, what kind of skill/luck does it take to get it on the roof without breaking and/or rolling back off?
On sunny days there’s always a squirrel or two out, and it’s not uncommon for them to leap the 5 feet or so to the building and then run along the window sill just barely hanging on. Makes this scratching sound that makes you turn to watch for the few seconds before they are gone, never seen one fall yet! The windows carry over into our small kitchen area, and perhaps the strangest thing we’ve seen was a vulture perched on a dead limb just outside the window…while we talked about economy!
The office before that was horrible for me, I had no windows at all. Hated it, but at the time it was the best we could find, smaller spaces being hard to find. Back before that, I spent just about 2-1/2 years in a 3rd floor office that looked out over a small parking area to a tree line. Third floor actually gives you a decent range to look, and the thing I remember most about that was that if you look at the top of the tree line you’ll see trees “fighting” for top position, the winners being very tall but very thin in most cases, sticking just above the rest to get max sunlight. Probably my favorite office/view so far. Before that I was in an interior office, and my only view outside was through the CIO’s office directly across the hall (looking out onto the same tree line), but it’s not the same.
Having windows isn’t quite the same as having a view, but it’s a start.
Does it make a difference? Maybe not to everyone, or maybe more accurately, not everyone finds it to be a big deal. I’d be very reluctant to go back to an office without an outside view, I do some of my best thinking looking out the window drinking coffee.
It was nice to work through my email and find a bit of positive news instead of more work! I’m in for another year it seems, and was great to see both Brent and Jeremiah make it onto MVP Island without booting me off. I did about the same amount of community work as the year before, still sticking to my plan of doing the things that either make sense for work or that I just want to do.
As I look back at one year as an MVP (and I don’t claim to be typical), I’ll share some thoughts:
My only plan for year two is to nominate more people for MVP. I’ve put two in so far and I’m going to try to find at least one person a month. I’ll look for people that are doing good work and have good character, and let the MVP team figure it out from there.
You can read the full text of it in today’s SSC Newsletter, the quick summary is that for many businesses a database is a toaster. They don’t care how it works, they don’t want to do anything to it, they just want it to work. If it breaks they fix it or call someone. Give it a read and see what you think.
I’m slated to write one a month and I haven’t settled on a theme yet, and don’t know if I will. More likely I’ll look for ideas as I’m out with groups and look for things that intrigue me, not much different than how I find blog ideas. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
It’s also funny how you can so easily add one more thing to your task list. Writing one editorial a month doesn’t seem like a lot, even writing twelve a year. But at an average of an hour each, that’s 12 hours that’s either added to the stack or taken away from something else. Ideally you know the answer to that before you say yes!
I try not to post too many links without some thoughtful commentary, but I ran across this and thought it was worth mentioning. TinEye takes an image you upload and then looks for it on the web in all it’s variations. They’ve got some interesting matches shown, all based on the image and not meta data.
I glance at Make (magazine and web site) from time to time, and recently have been recording and watching their TV show as well. The most recent issue has something called the Rok-Bak chair, a fairly simple (or so it seems!) project made from one sheet of plywood and some odds and ends. You can see a picture of it at http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol19/?pg=90. I think I might paint mine rather than go with the plain wood finish, but we’ll see how it turns out first. The first step is to layout the cutting diagram per the instructions at http://makezine.com/19/rokbak/ (free download and I didn’t want to post their image). I spent probably 30 minutes getting all the lines transferred over and about another 30 minutes doing the cutting. Breaking down plywood always a bit tedious, have to make sure the work is supported and some are stopped cuts that have to finished with a jigsaw. I was pleased that the two side pieces came out as a pretty good match, never a sure thing when you combine the chance of layout errors with unguided cuts. If I was making more of them I’d build a template first, rough cut the pieces and then use a router to make it precise…though there isn’t much extra wood along a couple lines and might have to be tweaked to allow that.
No picture yet, just a stack of hopefully cut correct plywood! Hopefully I can find another hour in the upcoming week to make some good progress.
I enjoy woodworking as a hobby and as I try new things I find that my work habits during the learning stage tend towards chaotic and I wind up with stuff every where. Part of that is just enthusiasm, wanting to move ahead and do stuff, part of it struggling so hard to master ideas and techniques that I wind up with tunnel vision. That often leaves me with tools, notes, and everything else stacked all over the place.
It’s a pattern I see in beginners with SQL too. They are intensely focused on syntax, trying to map how it works to whatever tool set they used before, and the early work is rough. As they begin to get over that first bit of learning curve they can then start to think about how do more interesting things.
You could call it lack of discipline and that’s true to an extent. On my new projects I need to slow down, clean up more often, try to see which tools I’m really done with and can put away. But it’s also true that I often don’t know when I’m done with a tool. Maybe I think I’ve done the final drilling, but then I find I missed something, or drilled a hole in the wrong place!
Many years ago I worked with an engineer that was meticulous about his work environment. He laid out a set of 8 pencils and pens in a certain way, had his log just so, and as he worked he would pickup a pen, use it, and then put it back in the right place. At the time I didn’t entirely appreciate the discipline it requires to build good habits, even if I still tend to think that one was a bit much.
Another story from even further back, I had a co-worker who drove a car that didn’t have the now entirely common warning buzzer if you left your headlights on. He had devised his own system; each time he turned the headlights on he took a clothespin from the ashtray and put it on the door handle, that way there was no way he could (reasonably!) exit without noticing the clothespin and that would cue him to turn off the lights and put the clothespin back on the ashtray. It worked well enough, though sometimes it did seem like a man that could do that every time could just as easily remember to run through a mental checklist each time he turned off the car.
For me, I find it’s easier to build bad habits than good ones, and probably true of most people. Good habits require you to make a continuing investment of energy that doesn’t seem to have a clear pay back. It’s also important to remember that while we might have good work habits on something we do all the time, we may have to build those habits on something new – think starting to use SSIS if you’re new to it.
We (Brian, Steve, and I) provided hosting for SQL chapters going way back…maybe 2002 or 2003, on behalf of PASS. When we sold our interest in SQLServerCentral.com to Red Gate we had to move them off the SSC domain, and we just grabbed SQLGroups.com. We didn’t do much with it besides that, it was an ‘interim’ solution that lasted a long time. But PASS has matured and now has a free hosting solution (using DNN again) that works, so we’ve notified the few remaining chapters that they have until Sep 15 to relocate.
Hopefully many will host with PASS, it’s good for both sides. Groups get the tools and the proximity to PASS and other groups, PASS gets more chapters in a place where it’s easy to share news and logins and more. It’s not perfect of course. DNN is powerful and flexible – if you know your way around. Brian has been looking at other solutions for his Jacksonville group and I’ve been doing the same – not out of any problem with PASS, more because we just like to tinker! More on that soon I hope.
It’s interesting that the number one thing I’ve heard from chapters over the years has been that they just want an easy way to email to their list. Many groups out run the limits of a single Outlook message, and they also need a way to manage subscribers. Lots of ways to do that of course, just give them one that works! Some of those conversations lead to the features we’ve implemented in SQLSaturday – making it easy to email to a subset of the list, making it easy to inject the list of sponsors or the schedule. I’d like to see PASS put more effort into their hosting solution with that regard – work on the things chapter leaders use most.
So it’s the end of a small quiet era for us, but I’d like to think we earned some karma from it.
Saw an announcement in Eweek about this, so went looking and found this review of the Imation SSD Upgrade Kit. Comes with the software to clone your existing drive, fits 2.5 or 3.5 inch configurations. A quick search on pricing it looks like $$275-$300 for the 64G, about $450 for the 128G. I’ve been pleased with the SSD in my Dell E6500, but for many of us our current laptops work fine, so this is an nice alternative to replacing the entire machine.
Let me know if you try it.
I ran across this post about time to move beyond 960 where it talks about most websites today are designed for 800x600 resolution. Does that still make sense? I remember working on a desktop application back in the 2001-2002 timeframe where it took a lot of effort to convince everyone that we should move from 640x480 to 800x600 – this at a time when the average monitor was a 17” CRT. SSC seems to fill the whole screen, but many sites – including SQLSaturday.com – only use a portion of it on my not unusual 20” wide screen LCD.
Not everyone has or wants a 20” monitor, though I’m using a 25” LCD at home now and enjoying it. What about people that want to view a site on a phone, does making it bigger make that a worse experience? Not many sites have the traffic to justify a true mobile version. And is the answer to put more information, more ads, on the page? Or should we bump the font size up and make things a little easier to read?
Or is that looking at it the wrong way, that we’re approaching the day where we won’t run apps full screen because we finally have enough room for side by side windows?
It’s interesting when technology evolves that sometimes it takes us time to adapt. We’ve got this extra capacity, now what can we do with it that is interesting?
I was having a discussion with Brian Knight yesterday about whitepapers and thought I’d share some of it – from my view point of course. I went to Wikipedia for their definition of whitepapers and they describe it as an authoritative report or guide, but goes on to say that they have evolved into primarily marketing tools of three types; business case, technical, and hybrid.
So first, do we need whitepapers? I think they fill a valuable niche between the blog/article style and size and that of a full fledged book. Its a good way to share some deep domain knowledge with a smaller investment of time and money. For most of us the challenge has become whether the content value of the whitepaper exceeds the marketing noise.
That said, it’s all about the money – someone has to write them and they expect (and deserve) to be paid. Most vendors want to draw traffic to their sites so you’ll at least see their products and services and I have no quibble with that. They invest in having a whitepaper created as a marketing expense, but to what extent should the whitepaper be tailored to their products and services? I guess that depends on how it’s framed – clearly one on SQL statistics implies a requirement to use SQL Server!
I think the problem is that we’ve come to expect a heavy vendor bias in these things, which leads to some interesting behaviors:
I vote for one percent marketing, Brian thinks that’s unrealistic – but we agree that it’s a slider, as the person paying for it you can move the slider from gift to the world to totally sales push as you decide is appropriate. Brian says they still work despite my distaste for them and thinks I take a harsher view than most – thus the post today!
Things I’m ok with:
Things I’d prefer:
Things that ain’t happening:
Direct mail and spam works because a small percentage of people think that they really have to order in the next 15 minutes. What about the rest of us? Do they only market to the non-cynical?
I’ll blog more about marketing soon because it’s the weakest point of my game (or one of them anyway) and I probably don’t have a realistic world view of what it takes to sell things, but I still think it can be done in a way that provides value to both sides and ultimately drives paying business without resorting to anything close to a questionable practice.
So what do you think? Am I taking too tough a view? Do you read and value whitepapers? What kind of filter do you apply?
Russ Fustino from Microsoft just sent me the link to episode #3 that was filmed at SQLSaturday #14 in Pensacola. Russ and Stan Schultes put on a pretty good show. Most of it is .Net, but Jessica Moss does a segment on data profiling.
