Paul Randal (Blog – @PaulRandal) tagged me in a post about the three events that brought him here. I had to think about this one for a while, and I even talked it over with Erika.
Discovering BBSes
Long before the public got access to the Internet, I was logging onto Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) with my [...]
David Allen’s productivity book, Getting Things Done, has made me a better person.
After using its methods for years, I’m even more convinced it can help anybody in IT. Today, I’m going to explain how I worked before GTD, and how I work with it now.
How I Handled Tasks Before GTD
Years ago, I tracked my [...]
In the 1980s, Nancy Reagan attempted to solve our nation’s drug problem by encouraging kids to “Just Say No” if they were offered drugs.
According to my research performed while watching popular television shows like Burn Notice, CSI:Miami, Law & Order, and Spongebob Squarepants, it appears that people are still saying yes to drugs.
However, I’ve had [...]
Erika and I have moved a lot lately!
In 2005, we left Houston, Texas and moved to Miami Beach, Florida so Erika could pursue her education as an air traffic controller. In early 2008, when she finished her degree and got an offer from the FAA, we moved back to Houston. Later that year, when she [...]
The good news: in the official press release announcing the winners of the Chicago-Mac sailing race, the Hannah Frances was included along with the winners.
The bad news was the way we got mentioned:
“While 33 boats chose to retire, most citing reasons related to the slow conditions such as lack of provisions or crew commitments elsewhere, [...]
Every year, Quest Software convenes a Customer Advisory Board at the home office in Aliso Viejo, California. We bring some of our highly experienced customers out for a couple of days to talk about what’s happening with technology, and good times are had by all.
At the welcome reception, I was struck by how many of [...]
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays long-distance sailors from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Chicago-Mac race sailors stand a pretty good chance of running into bad weather, so I picked up a set of foulies.
Pictured here: bibs, just one part of the foul weather gear. Sailing in foul [...]
Since 1898, sailors have gathered at the Chicago Yacht Club each summer to race their sailboats up Lake Michigan to the Mackinac (pronounced mackinaw) Island. The 333 mile course from Navy Pier to the lighthouse makes it the longest annual freshwater sailing race in the world.
The sailboats race around the clock for days as the [...]
I’ve been joking a lot on Twitter about the passing of the King of Pop. Somewhere between the Jesus Juice and the Elephant Man, he’d lost a lot of credibility in his fading years. Earlier in both of our lives, though, things were different.
In middle school when he was at the peak of his popularity, [...]
Chris Shaw tagged SQL Server DBA bloggers and asked, “Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?”
I’ve been fortunate to work for a stream of really, really good managers, but “leader” means something else, as Chris explained. I even had to hit the dictionary because I wasn’t [...]
Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.
Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.
Read More »Erika’s friends call her “Fancy Feast” because she only likes the best things in life. She’s got champagne tastes, but we can’t afford to buy the best of everything. I recently picked up a coffee table from Ikea, and it got me thinking about SQL Azure.
In a perfect world, I’d have on-premise SQL Server for every database. I’d use cutting-edge storage and cluster everything. But this isn’t a perfect world…
Read More »I get a lot of questions from people who want to get a better job. They want to know if certification, training, or branching out will help them get the job of their dreams. These things just aren’t the real answer.
The answer is simple: the Buddy System. Learn why.
Read More »In high school, I threw a huge party in Grandma’s house. It had long-lasting implications – among other things, I got disinherited.
Learn why SQL Server data compression has a lot in common with me after that Jungle Juice bash.
Read More »When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25″ hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length.
Things have changed since Grandpa’s time, though, and now it’s time to learn a new performance tuning trick – SQL Server waits.
Read More »