Allen White

In Seattle and Ready for PASS

After a very enjoyable two and a half day trip from Cleveland to Seattle aboard Amtrak, I'm in Seattle and excited about PASS. The last time PASS was held here in Seattle was three years ago, and I met some really great guys working on what they called the SIG Challenge (or something like that) where we worked together on a database project in competition with three other teams. We didn't win, but we became friends and meet at PASS every year. This year Morten Baden Rohde of JN Data A/S in Denmark decided to meet me in Chicago and take the train with me to Seattle. (We'll meet up with Johan Bijnens of Arcelor in Belgium on Monday.)

We got to Seattle, checked in to our hotels and had dinner at the Fox Sports Grill, then picked up our registration materials. (The Speaker ribbon on my badge this year is VERY cool.) Included in the green back pack they gave us is a DVD with about a dozen Hands-On Labs, and the Virtual PC images to run them yourself. I can't think of a better way to learn about this technology than to be able to practice it in the VPC environment, where you can break things and just reinstall the VPC image and try again. Kudos to Microsoft and to PASS for making this available to all the attendees of this conference.

I also wanted to thank Morten for helping me tune some of the demos in my presentation after I did a practice session for him on the train on Saturday. It really helps having someone who understands the technology sit through the session to make sure I'm delivering useful information. He'll be in the audience, along with Johan, who sent me this small code snippet:

With [Allen's SMO-session at SQLPASS]
    .Checked = true
    .RemindMe=true
    .AskSillyQuestions=False
    .CuchFrequency=(-1)  ' 1 per minute (-1 = disabled)
    .HaveABeerAfterward=true
End With

("Cuch" meaning cough, of course.)

It's making friends like these, as well as all the great technical resources that make PASS so worthwhile.

Allen