Book Review: Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States

Another choice brought about by wandering the local library, Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States by Herman Obermayer ($11 @ Amazon). I usually avoid anything related to politics in the last 30 years or so, and still do! I’m sharing this because it’s a different book than might […]

A Complex Shower

When I arrived at the Hutton Hotel in Nashville for the PASS Board meeting recently they couldn’t find my reservation. Customer service person number one handed me off to person number two, then to number three, and finally number four. I didn’t have the confirmation number handy and in fact had not made the reservation […]

PASS 2010 Elections Are Open

Voting began yesterday with ballots mailed to qualified members. More information can be found here, including contact info for Hannes at PASS HQ if you think you should have received a ballot and did not. You can find more information about the candidates here, and I encourage you to read that and explore candidate blogs […]

Networking to Build Business Contacts

I’m borrowing the title for this post from the pre-conference seminar Don Gabor is doing at this PASS Summit this year. It’s a 2 hour seminar that happens Monday afternoon at 4:30 pm, which means you can do a full length seminar and attend this one, or if you’re arriving mid afternoon on Monday you […]

Notes on Jacksonville Code Camp 2010

Overall it was a great event, attendance in the 350-400 range. Boxed lunches instead of pizza (good!), not much in the way of drinks/breakfast (not so good), check-in ran smoothly. Everything seemed to run smoothly. Team Jax did a nice job! The speaker party was a cigar bar, the second year in a row. I […]

SQLRally Pre-Con Selection Process – Draft for Comment

Hopefully you’ve heard by now that PASS is launching a new event format called SQLRally in May 2011 in Orlando. It will be a two day conference, preceded by one day of seminars. Because it’s a new format, we can – if we choose – build a new process for how we pick these seminars. […]

Positioning SQLRally in the PASS Event Universe

Prior to creating SQLRally the world of PASS consisted of the PASS Summit which is our annual mega-event, the European Summit, SQLSaturday, chapter meetings, and the occasional launch event. With all that going on, did we need another brand? What market void does it fill? And how is it different from our other events? I […]

Upcoming PASS Performance Virtual Chapter Presentation

I’ll be doing an introductory level presentation on statistics for the Performance VC on September 7th, details and the LiveMeeting URL at http://performance.sqlpass.org/). For those of you who have been tuning for a while you’re not likely to learn a lot of new stuff, really focused on those new to the concepts and showing them […]

PASS Update #42

Our most recent board meeting was in Nashville on Aug 19, 20. We had originally discussed meeting in Seattle/Redmond/Vancouver, but by the time we scheduled the August meeting a few of us had already committed to attending the SQLSaturday in Nashville, so it just made sense to have it there. I think that worked out […]

SSC Editorial – What Superhero Would You Be?

This was written for something fun on a Friday, but it’s still interesting for coffee talk anytime – what superhero would you be if you could? Saw a few votes for Batman, a couple for the Flash, and a few more unusual ones – read the comments on the original post, good stuff! I think […]