Well, I’ve not been 100% for the past couple of weeks – been a bit under the weather. I’m behind (go figure) and I have a lot of catching up to do! Thought I’d give you a heads up on what’s to come and what I’ve done recently (well, before I seemingly dropped off the blogging planet).
On July 29, I did a .NET Rocks interview with Carl and Rory… I was nervous and unsure of the abuse that might be waiting for me on the show but it was nothing nearly as bad as my imagination had made it. I had a blast. In fact, we ended up running over and the show hit 2.5 hours. It was a great time! For those of you that were there you had GREAT questions and a very active chat. One person said that half the show was in the chat and well, there were some crazy/fun comments there for sure! Anyway, I’m looking forward to doing it again if they’ll have me back. Listen to the show from Franklins.Net here or from MSDN here.
On July 30, I delivered a lecture that was one of the shortest lectures I’ve ever given yet one of the most stressful. In fact, I started writing about it almost immediately after it finished but I never got to posting it. Here’s a bit of inight into my 15 minute demo:
As I start to relax from what I would consider a very stressful day, I think about why it was so stressful?! I give presentations to sometimes extremely large audiences… but today was different! Today, I gave a presentation at Microsoft. Now this is something I do quite often as well (been delivering internal education courses for the past 9 years on campus) however, today was still different. First, I was the only external speaker and second, the audience was the Business Intelligence division of the SQL Server Development team. It all started about a month prior when I was asked to create a demo for the “All Hands” meeting. The BI All Hands meeting is an informal meeting where the BI team gets together and does a “demo fest” (which sounded harmless). It’s partially about learning how other groups are using SQL Server related tools as well as specific case studies of customers using BI. And – it’s also about team building. Between each demo the BI team played games, answered trivia questions and then the day ended with Karaoke. I have to admit – I’m glad everyone is technology focused in their careers! J J J
So, my demo was to be only 15 minutes and I was to demo my favorite features from the SQL Server 2005 tool set. This actually sounded like fun, I agreed.
For my “15 minutes of fame,” I chose to demo: SQL Profiler (with Performance Monitor integration/correlation), SQLCMD, SQLiMail and SQL Management Studio. I had no slides and did nothing but one long, integrated demo using all of these tools. The demo actually went well – only one minor network glitch but even that only lasted a few seconds. Overall, it should not have been that stressful?! But there were two stressful factors: one, it was the SQL Server Development Team (an audience that’s already somewhat familiar with the product <g>) and two, there was a minor schedule adjustment only one week prior to the event. It wasn’t a huge schedule adjustment, just a simple flip-flop of a couple of sessions. However, the effect was that my demo would precede
So – I’m writing this blog entry just to say hi… to tell you that I’m still around and that I’m still just as excited about SQL Server as I ever was. I’ve updated a few things on SQLskills and I plan to catch up on a lot of my outstanding Q&A within the next couple of days. Additionally, I plan to start blogging about SQL Server 2005. So, thanks for checking in with me and stay tuned there’s a lot more good stuff yet to come! (well, I hope you like it!)
Hope you’re having a great summer (or winter J) and that you and your family are happy, healthy and together!