Misc
Misc
I was at the MVP Summit in Seattle last week. It was my first summit and just like I expected, I ended up having great time. Aside from reconnecting with many friends, I made a few more. As always, the biggest challenge was getting up at 6:30 to make the first session after hanging out late into the night. It was kinda cool seeing Bill Gates live, even though he is a bit dry as a speaker. I like the guy, that’s why I am willing to forgive him that he mentioned MS Access and not SQL Server as his favorite product. On the other hand, I was quite happy to hear that many SQL heads “like” SharePoint just as much as I do.
But then the nightmare began for me. I was supposed to fly home on Thursday night. In the afternoon Delta left me a voicemail and told me that my flight was cancelled and that I was rescheduled for Saturday. After being on hold for an hour my cell phone died so I decided to go to the airport, and that’s where I found out about airport closures on East Coast. I ended up getting a cheap hotel near the airport for two nights where for a lack of other things to do, I caught up on sleep. This actually turned out to be a good (and much needed) thing for me later on. On Saturday I made it to Atlanta and when I was about to board my plane to Burlington, they told me that the plane was too heavy to board anymore passengers. The most frustrating thing was when they told me I was bumped off on first come, first served basis so remember this lesson – board your plane as early as you can. After waiting at the ticket counter for 2 hours, I was told that the next available flight to Burlington was on Thursday the 22nd. They offered other options, like flying to Montreal in 4 days, or flying to Detroit(!) on Wednesday. It seemed that all I could do was to show up at the airport every day and hope I would get on a flight with a standby ticket. The most annoying thing was that Delta wasn’t even willing to pay for a hotel, even though it was obvious that they overloaded the plane with luggage.
So at that point after adding up the cost of 4 more unpaid days plus a hotel, I decided to rent a car and drive home. I booked a car from Hertz for $430, they made me do a two day minimum one way rental since it’s such a distance. I waited in another line for 30 minutes trying to get my luggage, only to be told that I would have to wait at least 3 hours if I was lucky. So I finally left the airport at midnight and I can say, it was very liberating to be finally in charge of my destiny. The drive went really well, thank God for that extra sleep in Seattle because I was able to drive without any breaks, aside from getting gas and junk food. 19 hours later at 7PM on Sunday I was finally home, only to be greeted by 3 feet of snow in my driveway. The girls were very happy to have me back…
Since I recently switched jobs, I pretty much had to finance this trip myself and take unpaid time off work. This travel nightmare added about $1,000 to the total cost, things like the hotel in Seattle, cabs, car rental, gas from Atlanta to Vermont and all the tolls along the way. Would I still have gone to the MVP Summit if I had known this was gonna happen? You bet!
My company, Competitive Computing, has several job openings in our Vermont office. You can get more details at JobsInVT.com. Please contact me for more details if you decide to apply.
I just got back from a great vacation in Florida. This was first time in ages I was able to just get away and forget it all, probably because I left my work laptop behind. I was concerned about someone stealing it from the rental car so I brought my bare bones Tablet PC instead, only to leave it behind in a St Petersburg restaurant under the table. Luckily there are still plenty of honest people in the world and I got it back when I returned about two hours later. Yes, it took me that long to notice that I indeed had taken my knapsack from the hotel when we went out.
I am now rested and caught up with my TIVO list so I am ready and psyched to work with the April CTP, as soon as that bloody download is finished (20 hours and counting). Why we just can't download a bunch of zip files when and if we need them instead of that huge ISO is beyond me...
I will also be presenting at the PASS Community Summit just like many other SQL Junkies. My session will be “Overview of ADO.NET 2.0”. At one of my old jobs I briefly enjoyed the status of being the “ADO man”, but then I never learnt enough about ADO.NET to retain the status so I am hoping that the prep time for this presentation will get me back there.
This is an interesting announcement - the Junkies sites just got purchased by CMP Media, the publisher of many programming and other magazines. I guess that's good for us, we'll see...
More info here.
I am beginning to think that maybe Benjamin Franklin was right about this after all. Last night I went to bed at 9, woke up at 2:30 this morning and I've already got so much stuff done, I can't even believe it. I already watched 2 episodes of Nip/Tuck on Tivo, wrote 8 emails, worked for a couple of hours, went to the gym and burned 450 calories on StairMaster, wrote a few paragraphs for an RFP (justifying why SQL Server is a better option than Oracle), and went out for breakfast. A special bonus was that I saw the sunrise this morning. I don't even remember the last time that happened but it sure wasn't because I got up early.
If I can keep this up, I'll be able to watch most of those great webcasts Adam pointed out yesterday.
This week I heard from someone that Peter DeBetta's Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Developers is really excellent, packed with useful stuff but easy to read. I went to Amazon to check out reviews and while I was there, I noticed that the second edition of ADO.NET and System.Xml v. 2.0 by Alex Homer/Dave Sussman/Mark Fussell just came out. According to Mark's blog the book is a total rewrite and twice as thick so I decided to get it, even though I have the first edition.
Then I did what I usually do - I went to Bookpool.com and ordered both books there for much less. Bookpool's prices on technical books are almost always better and since they are in MA, I get my orders in about two days as opposed to 7-8 business days Amazon takes to deliver to Vermont. I long ago gave up checking prices on Barnes&Noble, their technical books seem to have hardly any discounts. And I don't feel guilty about Amazon, I still buy plenty of non-technical books and DVDs from them.
Last week I mentioned in the comments to my Install issue with CTP3 blog that I was using NTFS compression to keep the size of those huge virtual machines down. My experience was that despite of what we hear about compression, the performance of virtual machines is actually better when the VHD file is compressed, as long as your CPU can keep up with decompressing on the fly. Since then Adam and Robert confirmed that they had similar experiences. So it would appear that at least with laptops where disk I/O is more likely to be the bottleneck than the processor, you could benefit from compressing. But I guess even if you didn't, it's still nice to save a few gigs of space.
I just got an external USB2 hard drive and I am planning to do some benchmarks to compare the speed of my virtual machines there with the speed on the laptop disk. Some posts on the Internet indicate that it might perform better because the guest OS would be on a different spindle. If that's the case, I'll probably start lugging the disk around with me, even though it will be a PITA since I constantly move my laptop between the office, Vermont home and Montreal home. But having 250GB of space is still very appealing, especially since it would allow me to build a virtual SQL Server cluster.
The Vermont .NET User Group and the Vermont SQL Server SIG will be cohosting a meeting tomorrow night at Gardener's Supply in Burlington, Vermont. Rod Paddock from Seattle, the editor of Code Magazine and author of several programming books will be presenting Creating SQL 2005 Custom Data Types and Aggregates using VS NET 2005. He'll be doing the same presentation on Tuesday at the Montreal SQL Server UG meeting.
Tom Rizzo made my day when he admitted that he couldn't figure out how to include an image in his blog. I found it very amusing because when I ran into the same issue about two months ago, I had to email my buddy Dave Burke and ask “how the hell do you do that in your blog“?
This just proves that there is no reason to be embarrassed to ask even a simple technical question regardless of your background. A few months ago I was doing contract work for my previous employer and the architect from my old team called me to his office to help him with something. Ron is a programming/architecting guru, in my opinion the best in Vermont when it comes to Microsoft technologies. So here we were in his office, downloading VS 2005 and scratching our heads trying to figure out what those *.IMG files were and what to do with them. We never found out, he said he was gonna ask around. Then last Saturday I download VS 2005 and this time I had to figure it out. I started writing an email to Dave again, but then my pride won and I spent 30 minutes googling to finally find out that all I have to do is change the extension from IMG to ISO and use any CD burning software to make a CD. Yeah, go figure!
Kevin Kline, the current president of Professional Association for SQL Server, started blogging recently on the SQL Server magazine web site. One of his recent posts describes his recent brush with death. Wow, that's some scary stuff. I think I will be afraid to take antibiotics from now on.
He mentions something about deep thinking to do and reassessing the priorities in his life. I just hope that SQL Server and the SQL Server community will still be high on the list of Kevin's priorities since he is one of the most dedicated and knowledgeable professionals in the SQL Server community.
We are in the final stages of selecting speakers and sessions for the upcoming
DevTeach 2005 conference. I am trying to finish my Tech Chair duties and get everybody's bio, pictures, email and abstracts together, but it's not as easy as it sounds. One thing I find particularly amusing is that several speakers requested more time before they send me that “perfect picture“. I don't know, it may be that they are trying to lose a few more pounds or need to do some tricks in PhotoShop. I also heard something about needing a haircut. Can't wait to see those pictures...
If you haven't had a chance to buy something special for your Valentine, you still have time to order a cool gift from the “sweetiest site on the web“, Hershey's Gifts. The personalized items are usually a huge hit. I got a bunch at Christmas for my family and my mother wouldn't let anybody touch them for a week because they looked so cool.
I am only plugging this site because I worked on it very hard last year. I even had to sacrifice going to TechEd to meet some deadlines and I was already registered and ready to go. It was a great project though. I worked on a custom log shipping app for shipping transaction logs to a standby SQL Server, integration with a Solaris fulfillment backend via MSMQ-MQSeries Bridge and also implementing a reporting portal with Reporting Services.
I hate to do this but comment spam is getting out of hand. I turned them back on just this morning and that asshole already posted 10 spams. If you want to comment on my blog entries please email me and I'll put them in. Without any censoring...
My five year old daughter just loves my new TabletPC, I have a hard time to keep it away from her. I asked her to compose a HNY greeting and she happily complied so here it is.
Happy New Year everyone!
If you still have any turkey leftovers, try this
Turkey Sage Chowder recipe. You won't regret, especially if you're getting sick of eating the same thing since Thursday.