Farewell, Gareth Swanepoel

Not easy to say, Gareth passed away a few days ago. We’d both gotten busy and with Covid added in, we had not caught up in a while. Now, as often happens, it’s too late. I sure miss him. The memorial service is tomorrow, January 14, 2021 at 10:15 EST. Obituary and a link to […]

Filing the Annual Tax Return for SQLOrlando

Similar to my earlier post on filing the annual report, once a year we have to file a tax return with the IRS. Basically if the revenue is less than $50k you can do the “e-postcard” filing. Here’s the trello card: Right off the bat I stalled because I didn’t know my user name or […]

Annual Corporate Report Filing for SQLOrlando

As a Florida corporation we have to file an annual report. Sounds complicated, but for us it’s a five minute task. Here’s the Trello card for the work I just did: One of the habits I’ve tried to stick to is when I do a task, especially one I don’t do often, is it look […]

Splitting up the Mission of PASS

Following up on Should There Be A Successor to PASS? I have a couple more thoughts. One of the many complaints about PASS over the years was about perceived value. Most everyone saw the value of the Summit but after that it was not a simple conversation to convince someone in the audience about the value […]

Should There Be A Successor to PASS?

PASS was a big influence on a lot of us and did a lot of good, if never quite as much good as many of us wished. I wish PASS had survived, but it didn’t, and now we’re at a crossroads for what comes next. We’ve got short term challenges as far as supporting events […]

The 2021 Plan for SQLOrlando

Over the past couple years we’ve been slowly evolving from a fairly adhoc plan of doing what we did last year to a semi structured plan that was mainly bullet points to a more structured and written out plan for 2021. Writing out a formal (ish) plan supports these goals: Explain clearly to the Board […]

Some Post-PASS Thoughts on Local User Groups

For all the groups the most immediate need is to rescue what they can of the mailing list stored at PASS.org and to have a new landing page and/or meeting registration site. The challenge on the mailing list is that you can’t export it (privacy!), so the best you can do is email (multiple times) […]

A Note to the PASS Board of Directors

I just read with dismay that Mindy Curnutt has resigned. That’s a big loss at a time when the future of PASS is in doubt and we need all hands engaged. The reasons she gives for leaving with regards to secrecy and participation are concerning, troublesome, yet not really surprising. The cult of secrecy has […]

Requesting Comments on the SQLOrlando Operations Manual

For the past couple weeks I’ve been trying to capture a lot of ideas about how and what and why we do things in Orlando and put them into an organized format. I’m sharing here in hopes that some of you will find it useful and that some of you will have questions, comments, or […]

The Future of PASS

2020 has been a tough year for PASS. It’s primary fund raiser – the PASS Summit – was converted to a virtual event that attracted fewer attendees and far less revenue than the in-person version. Going into the event they were projecting a budget shortfall of $1.5 million for the fiscal year ending in June […]