Blogging is FUN!

catching up…

I’m starting to fall back into a bad habit of not posting regularly; I’ve already missed a couple of weekly updates, and I haven’t shown off much coding lately.  I wish I could blame it on a lack of time, but the truth is that I’m lazy.  Even though I’ve been keeping busy, I still have plenty of free time.  I’ve just been frittering it away on television.  However, I’ve decided I’m going to take some advice from a fellow blogger: if you can’t keep a committment to two posts a week, commit to one.  Henceforth, I’ll be posting at least one post a week on Wednesday nights.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, here’s the breakdown of what’s been up with me since my last post:

  • Judged a speech contest at the local community college,
  • Started our latest sprint in the scrum method at work,
  • Finished the sponsor letter for SQLSaturday,
  • made several appeals for volunteers and speakers for SQLSaturday,
  • finally took down my Christmas lights, and
  • cleaned my home office.

I’m pooped just making the list.  🙂

2009-01-22 by Blogging is FUN! Conferences 0

Happy New Year!

So, sitting up and watching Double Impact and cruising the web, I read Andy Warren’s Thoughts for 2009, and I thought I should probably contribute my own ideas as well.  I definitely want to spend more time blogging and contributing to the user groups at large.  Obviously, I’m going to be tied up with SQL Saturday for the first part of the year (speaking of which, I need to get my sponsor letter organized), but I still want to do more. 

Professionally, I need to find more leadership opportunities in my company.  This year’s a bit of a challenge because we’re understaffed with a lot of projects coming down the pipe, and there’s not a lot of openings in management positions, BUT I need to find a way to make my name known.  I want to be the SQL guy for not just my division, but I also want to expand beyond that to the company level as well.

I want to complete my MCITP certs for database administration and development this year.  One thing I learned at PASS Summit was that I need to continue to find ways to expand my knowledge.  I feel very confident in my ability to code T-SQL and design elegant database solutions, but I have 0 experience in Microsoft’s BI solution, and my DBA skills are a bit rusty.

I like Andy’s suggestion to play chess; I’m going to open that up and say I want to play more games with my kids.  They’re getting older, and soon they’ll be too old to hang out with me.  I want to find ways to encourage them to think, and I want to spend time just having fun with them.

Finally, I’m going to get healthy.  As soon as this shoulder recuperates from surgery, I’m back on the workout routine.  I am going to find 30 minutes a day to work out, and I’m going to stick to it.

How about you?

2009-01-02 by Blogging is FUN! Education Health 0

Testing a blogging client

So, this is a simple post (which most of you wil probably ignore), but I wanted to try out w.bloggar. Part of the reason is to take advantage of some of the client side tools, but probably the biggest reason is to add a little footnote to each post letting you know what music I’m listening to. Figured it would give you a little insight into my own warped brain 🙂

[Listening to: Long Black Veil – The Proclaimers – Finest (03:03)]
2008-12-08 by Blogging is FUN! 0

a few more tweaks….

So, I spent part of the day reading Brent’s great series on starting a technical blog, and paid a lot of attention to his most recent post How to Start a Technical Blog, Part 3: WordPress Plugins.  I’ve got to hand it to the WordPress developers; there’s a lot of cool stuff out there.  I added several of the plugins he mentioned; my favorite is MobilePress, which automatically makes my blog mobile friendly.  You can now get gumbo to go.

I’m also continuing to tweak the theme, and have added some items to the RSS feeds.  For those of you WordPress bloggers, a question: at what point do you consider a theme to be no longer the original?  I like this theme, but I’m working very hard to make it mine.

More to come.

2008-12-04 by Blogging is FUN! 0

Playing with themes

One of the benefits of starting over is that I now have access to the latest themes; I like this one, it’s simple, and I’ll be able to tweak it to fit my needs pretty easily.  More to come, but I think I’m done for the evening.

2008-12-03 by Blogging is FUN! 0

starting over (expletives deleted)

So…. my support provider upgraded their service this month, and I thought to myself: “Self, since you’re in an upgrading mood, AND you’ve decided to take this blogging thing for real, why not upgrade your site to the newest WordPress”.

I should learn to not listen to myself, or least when I listen, approach any ideas that that guy has with extreme caution.  Since my site provider now has a handy-dandy installation option for WordPress, I figured it would be easy to just click the button and upgrade.  Unfortunately, I didn’t read the bit about clicking the button would OVERWRITE ANY DATABASE YOU HAVE.  Guess what?  Everything’s gone.

You would also think that being the database professional I am, I would believe in the almighty backup.  Well, I do believe… I just don’t practice that belief.  No backup.  I guess I’ve been working as a developer too long, trusting in my DBA’s to provide me with a backup when I need it.  On top of that, I’m stupid. 

I thought to myself: “Self, since you’re paying for support, see if they have a backup procedure”.  I thought, “Good idea, self!” (obviously, I didn’t pay attention to the earlier advice about not listening to that guy).  I contacted support, and while they DO have a backup process, I had wiped my tables in between the time that they had moved them to the new server and started backing them up.  Furthermore, the old server is now gone (apparantly taking the backup with it).

So, I’m starting over.  At least this way, I get a clean installation, and I get rid of the funky frames I had on the old site.  The bad news is that I’ve lost the one or two decent posts I’ve posted over the years.  At least I can repost them, and you, dear readers, will think they are fresh.

2008-12-02 by Blogging is FUN! 2