Watson Plays Jeopardy

I watched the documentary on Nova about the IBM project to build Watson, a computer that could play Jeopardy. The technical bits are interesting, maybe even staggering in some ways, especially when you consider it’s all to do what a single human can do! It ran without being connected to the internet during the game, […]

Marketing Ideas for Chapters & SQLSaturday

I’m part of the team putting together SQLSaturday #151 in Orlando this year, and one of the things Kendal Van Dyke asked if I could work on was marketing ideas. How do we reach more of those interested in SQL Server in or near Orlando? The task is to come up with ideas, then the […]

LinkedIn Group Recommendations-Not Quite Useful

I received an email from LinkedIn suggesting that I might find these groups useful: I’m sure those map back to someone in my network, but not sure at all how they would determine that these would fit me. BI gone wrong? Or do they know something I don’t?

The Brain Dump Blog

I was chatting with a friend recently and he said he could never blog the way I do. Which way is that? His take was I just dump my thoughts, and that doing so required some amount of courage to put unpolished thoughts out for reading by others. I haven’t ever thought of the way […]

Expectations-The Big Disconnect

One of the things I’ve learned from running events is to set expectations. If you’re going to provide coffee don’t run out of coffee – they expect it to be there. If you’re not going to provide coffee, that’s ok, as long as you let your attendees know. The thing about expectations that is hard […]

Build a Little Free Library

I saw this on the Boing Boing feed yesterday, Little Free Library is a project to try to build 2500 mini libraries (to give you an image, think book house rather than bird house). I’m taken with the simplicity of the project – just building something. Use their plan or use their own. Put one […]

Go Look at NELL

NELL (Never Ending Language Learning) is a computer system that is trying to learn to read the web. Couple things about this that might you find interesting: NELL tweets each time it learns a new fact – follow @cmunell You can download the belief file (15 million total, 1 million that are ‘high confidence’) Of […]

Varied and Interesting Links

Here are some things I’ve run across in the past few weeks you may find interesting: FailCon. Billed as a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others” failures and prepare for success. Talking about and sharing failure is powerful, I think worth the $79 entrance fee. Quickly […]

SQLRally 2012-Closing Thoughts

It was interesting to watch an event that started 17 months ago with Dallas, Nashville, and Denver submitting applications to the be host city, a long selection process, a long site selection process, and then all the rest that lead up to a successful event this week. I know that a lot of work went […]

SQLRally 2012-Friday

Started the day early, heading to the Convention Center to be at Starbucks at 6:45 for the networking event I was hosting with Craig Purnell (and with coffee paid for by the Dallas SQL Group!). Craig brought some ‘coffee tickets’ so we had some control over the budget and we waited to see how many […]