Road Trip and SQL Summit Notes
Last week was fun for me as I got to do the things I like best. If I could have just avoided catching a cold, it would have even better.
Monday was my last day at HDR and we finished the work day off at Old Chicago. It was very hard to go and I really do wish those who stayed behind the best.
Tuesday I drove up to my Brother's place in Black River Falls Wisconsin. They still have standing snow and water in the fields up there. After a long day of driving through Iowa, nothing tasted better than a tall glass of Oscar's Oatmeal Stout. Yum!
One thing about driving through Iowa -- If you can, get an XM radio. Sure, you could play CDs until your ears bleed, but I found myself bouncing between ESPN Radio, XM's version of Public Radio, XM xL Comedy, Lucy and Fred. Really helped the time to pass.
Wednesday I drove up to Eau Claire and spent most of the day in Borders (oh yeah, like I hated that...) since they were a T-Mobile HotSpot. Didn't really see new books of interest, but did find a nice (e.g., cheap) collection of Classic Music CDs.
That evening, I was lucky enough to get to talk to the Chippewa Valley .NET Users' Group about SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Nice mix of folks in this group and they had some good questions for me. Hopefully I get the chance to visit with them again. Following that, I made the trip up to Minneapolis. Talk about the trip from heck. Pouring rain at about 35-degrees. When I finally did get to the cities, I had to park forever and day away from the Hyatt and walk there in the rain. Despite all that, though, I'm glad I did since Peter DeBetta was their to great and share a beer with me. We talked about the usual stuff: our families, work and beer. We talked about his book too, and since Unisys was nice enough to buy one for every that attended the conference.
Thursday was the SQL Server Summit. Paul Flessner really kicked the show of well by talking frankly about why SQL Server 2005 is going in the right direction and why its features are important to us as customers and to Microsoft as a company. You could tell by his words and actions that he really does care deeply about the server product family and certainly demonstrated the creditability from his years of experience as a IT manager to back that up. I only found myself going to the developer session tracks and found them to be really good. First up was Peter who gave a complete and hasty overview of SQLCLR and SQLXML. He's a fun to watch on stage too as you really see that he loves teaching. Next up was Don Farmer talking about SIS for developers. Don is fun to watch go. Andy Morrison has notes about this talk here. I didn't get to see the motivational speaker over lunch since I had some work to do elsewhere, but did make it back in time to watch Steve Hughes from Magenic give a pretty interesting talk about Reporting Services for 2005. I really enjoyed Craig Neville and Lara Rubbeike's (both from BORN) presentation on Service Broker. Finally it was my turn to get up and talk about SQL Express. You can download that presentation from here (never mind the type-os, please.) Didn't get to catch the closing Keynote.
After the Show, I drove over to see Dawn and James Renner, two friends of my from way back. Jim and I went to High School together, while Dawn and I went to college together. They have a charming Daughter named Carmen. We headed out to Howie G's for dinner and that pretty much ended my day. I'm probably spoiled by Sushi Japan, so I had a their Ribeye Steak (YUM!) and glass of no-name Shiraz instead of the Sushi.
Drove back home on Friday. Needing gas, I stopped for a while at the Cabela's store in Owatonna, MN. Really nice place... could spend way too much money there, espeically shooting at trophy like these that they have on display:
