Notes from the December 2010 OPASS Meeting

Our December meeting was a time for a lot of changes: New location, the Hampton Inn in Lake Mary. It’s further north in a good tech area, great access, decent parking, decent room. New leaders. Well, sort of. Jack Corbett had been co-President for a year, but now he’s the sole big dog, and has […]

Email Pruning

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 […]

Soft Skills Matter More Than You Think

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 […]

More Networking Thoughts

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 […]

IT Education Part 2

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 […]

Book Review: The Way We Work Isn’t Working

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 […]

SQLSaturday #62–Too Many Speakers

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 […]

SQLRally Call for Speakers Closes December 15, 2010

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 […]

Not Enough Time

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 […]

IT Education Part 1

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 […]