If you haven't heard, PASS is running a contest where you could win conference registration to this year's PASS Community Summit or, if you have that covered, 4 nights coverage of hotel costs. All you have to do is enter by July 1. Check the link for details. Here's my… Read more

We had my organization's semi-annual combined IT and financial meeting this morning. At the end of these meetings awards and certifications are announced. I had earned an award but I wasn't recognized. I'm a bit disappointed, and I can understand why, but I also know that I shouldn't be. Oversights… Read more

Early last week, my church suffered a lightning strike that did quite a bit of damage (relatively speaking) to computer and media equipment. I spent a lot of time last week during off hours working the issue along with some other very knowledgable folks. We're not out of the woods yet,… Read more

When the announcement for Bing came out, I didn't immediately go over and check it out. As a matter of fact, I didn't even look at it. My reasoning was simple: Google was working well and therefore I didn't see any reason to switch. But this past Saturday, Paul Nielsen… Read more

This one isn't a technical post, but it's entirely appropriate to those of us in the IT field. Today was a stark reminder about priorities and what they should be. Those who follow me on Twitter probably saw that I tweeted about a tragedy that affected one of the families in… Read more

When it comes to securing a system, it's important to understand how it might be attacked. That's what surface area is all about. The surface area is the parts of the system which are exposed. For instance, in the case of a default instance of SQL Server 2005 or 2008,… Read more