One of the guys I met at the Denver User Group pinged me last week for lunch, and I agreed. Today I headed into town and we had a long lunch, almost 90 minutes, while we chatted about business, life, kids, and more.

It’s interesting to get a new perspective… Read more

Our second major repair will take place on the Prius, and once again it’s a cosmetic item. In fact, we’ve had 3 incidents in the Prius, none of which has affected the mechanical or electrical systems. It’s 2 years today what I bought the car, and so far we’ve had: Read more

Stick with the defaults. In fact, as Andy Warren has told me many times, unless you know better and have a reason to not do so, always go with the defaults. I think that’s good advice, and it’s why I think that defaults in applications, especially SQL Server, should be… Read more

A great example of how to “Tweet” poorly. This guy got fired before he started work.

Twitter is a series of hallway conversations. I think that’s a great description, and I’ll write more about that at some point. However just like those hallways, you need to be aware that… Read more

I’ve had a number of cell phones in my life, probably more than many people. Typically I’ve just grabbed a low end phone that serves as a phone and does a good job there. However as I’ve traveled more over the last few years, and have a need to be… Read more

One of the pieces of advice that I give in my talk "The Modern Resume" is that you should review, and likely touch, your resume once a quarter. It was a habit I got into when I worked in the corporate world after having a startup company that I worked… Read more

When I worked at JD Edwards years ago, we were looking for monthly teambuilding exercises that would help our group of 20 stay focused, and ensure we bonded together. We tried a variety of things, we’d plan and discuss ideas at a weekly meeting, and we would rotate the odd-man-out,… Read more

SQL Server 2008 introduces "Policy Based Management" (PBM) as a way to better manage your servers. This was a feature that I really thought had, and still has a lot of potential for making the life of a DBA easier.

The tagline for PBM is "manage by policy"… Read more

I've been amazed at the amount of content that I am getting at SQLServerCentral. So far, in 2009, I've received over 70 articles, usually at the rate of 10-12 a week. Granted some of these are resubmits based on comments I've made, but that's a lot of content.

I used… Read more

I’m not sure how I feel about Amazon invoking the DCMA clause to prevent other e-books from being read on the Kindle. On one hand I think that if encryption on other books is being cracked to put them on the Kindle, that’s an issue for other e-book vendors,… Read more

I found a cool video on the 37 Signals blog that showed the Audi A4 production process. It’s relatively low budget, not background noise or narration, just clips of the car being assembled.

A nice marketing move. For owners or potential customers, to feel a little closer to the car. Read more

I joined in late to a conference call this morning from Quest where a number of their experts were talking about various disaster stories that they'd experienced over the years. It's great to hear real DBAs talking about the problems and challenges they've actually experienced, and it should give those… Read more

I committed today to attend SQL Saturday #14 in Pensacola on June 6, 2009. I'll be giving The Modern Resume - Building Your Brand talk down there and taking a couple days to enjoy the gulf coast with my daughter. I've never been to this section of Floriday, so it… Read more

I tend to work with a fair number of documents in my job. Between articles that are sent to me, editorials I write, and presentations I give (not to mention blog posts), I have a lot of data floating around.

Over the years I've organized things into a few folders… Read more

Yesterday I presented to the Charlotte SQL Server User's Group. Since I live in Denver, it didn't make a lot of sense to travel to Charlotte, as much as I would have liked to see Peter Shire of SQL Sentry and a few other friends in the area. I'd… Read more

Since I’m doing more speaking this year, I decided to spend a bit of time working on my delivery and presentation. One of the things that I really like to do is walk around a bit and engage the people that are in the audience. Depending on the room and… Read more

I have to admit, after the news of AIG bonuses over the weekend, this looks bad. In fact, it annoys me. Microsoft is apparently getting $11 million dollars for a bridge to connect the two halves of its campus.

I get that this will be an improvement to the area,… Read more

One of the things that I've struggled with for some time is how to manage my data across multiple machines. I have my desktop below, which I love, and with the 3 monitors, I tend to do most of my work there.

However I also travel regularly with my laptop,… Read more

Last night I was at the store with Delaney after karate and he mentioned that we needed to go pick up snowboards from the shop. I'd forgotten Thur afternoon to get them and wanted to remind myself to go Fri.

I had my TMobile G1 with me, but also my… Read more

I was looking at Twitter the other day and saw a few of the people I follow debating the need for disconnected applications. With so many providers now offering wireless access plans for data, and the prices coming down to levels where almost tech professional can afford to have an… Read more