Email consumes a pretty significant chunk for me. Email for my day job, email for my blog, email from friend and family, email for learning and professional development, email with offers from various retailers I use here and there. It adds up. I use my phone a couple times a day to read and remove […]
Read more "Email Pruning"Over my career I’ve seen interviews fall into three categories: The technical part. Questions on trace flags, wait states, backups, etc, often on things bordering on trivia. They want someone that can do the job on day one without looking up how to do a backup or whatever. It’s far less about direct technical stuff […]
Read more "Soft Skills Matter More Than You Think"I’ve happened to have a few networking events happen recently that I thought I’d share, all part of trying to figure out when and how networking works best. I had a friend reach out to me (and this is someone I met from another friend) via LinkedIn to reach someone 2 more levels away from […]
Read more "More Networking Thoughts"For those thinking about an IT career the options are bewildering, and I think the education establishment doesn’t do a great job of explaining the many paths there are in IT. For example, if you’re going to write code, the world is largely split into .Net and Java. Yes, there are other technologies, but if […]
Read more "IT Education Part 2"The Way We Work Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz ($19 @ Amazon) is a holistic approach to work and a work life balance. It covers exercise, nutrition, sleep, recharging in good detail, drawing lessons from a lot of deeper studies to support the recommendations in the book. The most interesting part, the one that resonated […]
Read more "Book Review: The Way We Work Isn’t Working"I received the email this week that I won’t be getting a place on the schedule for SQLSaturday #62 in Tampa on January 15, 2011, nor will the other chapter leaders from Florida. The event team received a lot of abstracts and even with limiting each speaker to one, there still wasn’t enough room for […]
Read more "SQLSaturday #62–Too Many Speakers"The call for speakers is open through December 15, 2010, and I hope many of you will take the chance to throw a session or two into the SQLRally hat. Whether you get picked or not for the final program, it’s fun to be in the game, to enjoy the wait and the voting and […]
Read more "SQLRally Call for Speakers Closes December 15, 2010"I’ve been thinking about my goals for 2010, ones that I’ve set and adjusted a couple times, and thinking more about what I want to do in 2011. I’ve been forced to reluctantly admit that I cannot do all the things I want to do. That’s perhaps obvious, but not easy. There are far too […]
Read more "Not Enough Time"Like many in IT I’m self taught, starting with DOS and batch files, then proceeding through QuickBasic, Visual Basic in assorted flavors, Access, and of course SQL Server. I’ve learned what I needed and/or wanted to know about various technologies at various times, which is a practical approach with the downside of leaving gaps that […]
Read more "IT Education Part 1"I just re-read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank ($10 @ Amazon). It’s a bit of a touchstone for me. It was a favorite book of my father, and so reading it again is a chance to both revisit the story and to recall spending time with him. It’s an old book, published in 1959, and […]
Read more "Book Review: Alas, Babylon"
SQLAndy 