Instructables has a Paracord contest going that requires some portion of a project include paracord (often referred to as 550 cord for the breaking strength of 550 lbs. I don’t have a good idea yet, hoping one appears before the April 11 submission deadline. Thought I’d share, most of us in IT enjoy a challenge […]
Read more "Instructables Contest: Paracord"I had not heard of the stay interview until a friend sent over a link. The idea is that rather than waiting until they leave to diagnose what went wrong, you do periodic interviews to find out how they are doing and encourage them to stay. I’m interested in this from a management perspective, and […]
Read more "Stay Interview Instead of Exit Interview"I was killing a few minutes browsing while waiting on a call, had been thinking again whether a wiki would be the right approach for enhancing the SQLSaturday documentation, and ran across http://www.wikimatrix.org/, a site that compares in great detail all the various wiki apps out there. It’s the great part of browsing, sometimes you […]
Read more "A Wiki Wiki"It’s pretty common to download software as an ISO file (a disk image) and it seems like a waste to burn it to CD/DVD just to install it once. Instead, it makes a lot more sense to treat it as a virtual drive – if you have the right tool! I use Virtual CloneDrive. It’s […]
Read more "Review: Virtual CloneDrive"My wife and I try to have dinner out every other week or so, but we tend to fall into ruts, visiting the same handful of restaurants that are close to home, reasonably priced, and reasonably dependable. Sometimes that dinner night comes at the end of a long week or a hectic day, and while […]
Read more "Operation: Dinner Different"The title of this post illustrates my own ambiguity on the topic. It’s fair and necessary to let others know about your accomplishments (marketing), but it’s easy to descend into ‘hey look at me’ (promotion). Not sure how well I can show the distinction. Self marketing is an essential skill though, and it is worth […]
Read more "Self Promotion & Self Marketing"Saw the announcement by accident while doing some browsing on Amazon. Thought I’d try it out just to see. Download and install easy enough, connected to Amazon via the app and downloaded a free book – Sherlock Holmes. Paging works by hitting the space bar or moving the track bar, and the text is very […]
Read more "Kindle for the Blackberry"If you’ve been around SQL for any length of time it’s hard not to have heard of Brad McGehee, the blogger DBA behind Aloha DBA. Brad ran SQL-Server-Performance.com for many years and now works for Red Gate, spending a lot more time on the road than I’d want to going to events and user group […]
Read more "Featured Blog: Aloha DBA"I’m in the early stages of a book on managing and I’m starting to look for situations that might trigger ideas on areas I want to cover, and for situations that serve as good what would you do (WWYD) scenarios for potential managers. Scenarios give you a chance to practice without pain, and a chance […]
Read more "What Would You Do? Management Scenario #1"This happened earlier in the year, finally getting around to writing some notes on it – you can read more here. The numbers I found were that they were to save about $230k a year, mainly by reducing the need for two administrators. I’ve used Outlook and Exchange for years, and about all I can […]
Read more "City of Orlando Switches to Google Email"
SQLAndy 