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<\/I>). On July 29, I did a .NET Rocks<\/a> interview with Carl<\/a> and Rory<\/A>… 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<\/a> or from MSDN here<\/a>. 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! <\/SPAN>J<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> <\/SPAN>J<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> <\/SPAN>J<\/SPAN><\/SPAN> 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
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