Book Review: Alas, Babylon

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 […]

LiveWriter 2011

I recently upgraded to LiveWriter 2011 while upgrading to the final version of LiveMesh. After the upgrade I noted the new ribbon UI (see below), but otherwise can’t say that I noticed anything in the way of problems or new features that affected me. I write, include the occasional image, occasionally check the word count, […]

Book Review: Chasing Daylight

I read Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly after a reference to it in an audio book. It’s the story of KPMG CEO Eugene O’Kelly, a man that worked his way to the top and worked a lot. A great example was flying to Australia just to sit next to a potential client for 90 minutes […]

PASS Update #48

It’s the end of November and this will probably be my last update on PASS for the year as things slow down for the holidays. This seems like a good time to update you on ongoing projects and to think about where I’ll be headed next year. As I look back at 2010 it’s a […]

TechEd 2011

TechEd will be in Atlanta next year, May 16-19, 2011 at the Georgia World Conference Center. I went this year to the one in New Orleans and would like to go again in 2011, though the one wrinkle for me is that it’s the week immediately following SQLRally. I’m expecting SQLRally to be an intense […]

Android Adventures–Part 2

I’ve been living with my Droid X phone for a couple weeks now. It’s definitely a big change from my Blackberry. As I think about what to you tell about it, it’s hard to separate the phone from the software from the usefulness, but I’ll try to share thoughts on all. The phone itself seems […]

Don’t Abuse the Use Statement

I ran across this article in Visual Studio Magazine that tracks the source of a missing object to an embedded use statement. It’s not wrong to do that, but maybe it should be! For admin scripts, testing, etc, USE is valuable, but in the dev world it’s far better to solve the problem by adding […]

I am a Risk Taker

Somewhat of a strange title, but it’s been an interesting journey to understand that I do take risks and to realize that taking risks isn’t bad. I’ll start at the middle of the story. A few months back I let the PASS Board know that I was cancelling a project and calling it a failure […]

Template for Tracking Professional Development

One of the ideas I mentioned in my presentation on Comprehensive Professional Development was to set up some type of tracking system. It’s important to write down goals for time and money to devote to professional development, and to keep track of how you’re doing towards those goals. I keep thinking that I need to […]

A Plug for SQLSaturday #45 in Louisville

My friend Mala is heading up the 2nd annual SQLSaturday in Louisville, KY, being held next year on January 22, 2011 at the University of Louisville. The final schedule isn’t up yet but the list of submitted sessions looks good, lots of great speakers on the list. Somehow I had a mental image of Louisville […]