Notes from the 2013 American Association of Woodturners Symposium

This was my first time attending the AAW Symposium, hosted by the American Association of Woodturners. Here are some quick notes: I registered on site for just one day attendance, $175. Very nice printed and spiral bound program guide, full color. Profiles and contact info for the presenters included, plus some tips and projects. Schedule […]

Picking a Conference Venue

I was reading about the American Association of Woodturners annual symposium that will be held in Tampa this year (and yes, I plan to attend) and ran across this document that describes their process for picking a site each year. It’s not an equation, but here is the opening section that drives it: “The Board […]

My Evolving Goals for Attending Conferences

The first conference I went to back in 1999 I attended every session, the bonus sessions, the breakfasts, everything. It wasn’t a desire to get the maximum value for the registration cost as much as a desire to get the maximum value. I was new to IT and this was a gold plated chance to […]

SQLRally 2011–The Sessions I Plan to Attend

One of the ways to make the most of a conference (and to help justify the spend) is to go through the schedule and think about what sessions you want to attend. It’s never easy, there are always lots of good choices and it’s hard to settle on just one per time slot. I try […]

Done

When I’m in task processing mode the reply you’ll typically get from from me when the task is complete is “Done.”.. Sometimes it might be “Done!” if it was an urgent matter, but mostly it’s just “Done.”. Short and simple. If I see something interesting that might matter but probably doesn’t, I’ll add a sentence […]

The Power And Pain of Process–Part 1

Part of why I love IT is finding patterns and creating new ones. Patterns by themselves are interesting, but when you’re able to automate a pattern that’s when you start to really deliver value to a business. The result of that work is what I call process, and it might range from a batch file […]

Firefox and NTLM Authentication

By default Firefox doesn’t pass through NT credentials, not a big deal when you’re browsing Amazon by a big pain when you’re trying to hit a corporate Reporting Services site – you get prompted to enter credentials each time. It turns out there is an easy fix, just modify the config file with the names […]

A Plug for Wirefly

Wirefly is a website devoted to purchasing cell phones and plans. I found it when I was researching my Droid X, and you know how it is – should I trust a web site to deliver my phone? At the time the difference in cost was substantial, $99 via Wirefly which included 2 day Fedex, […]

Who Is This Super Hero?

We recently switched from Brighthouse to DirectTV and of the first things we did was to find the kids channels to see what we gained or lost. I flagged a few to record for use on the proverbial rainy day, and one of the ones I selected was Hong Kong Phooey, a cartoon that ran […]

Working on the Railroad

I work with a client that has an office about 25 yards from a train track and recently the railroad company decided it was time to do some maintenance on a large length of the track including that piece by the office. That ‘maintenance’ consisted of replacing all the ties under the rails. If you’ve […]