Buck Woody (Blog – @BuckWoody) tagged me in a blog post called How I Travel where he talks about how he packs, how he works on the road, and his journey logistics.  Paul Randal responded with the Paul and Kimberly Travel Guide, and those two are definitely hard-core travelers.  I think I’m probably the most amateur of that group.  I’ve blogged my Travel Tips for Non-Frequent Fliers, but here’s a few more thoughts.

My Travel History

I got started working in the hospitality business – hotels & restaurants – and worked my way up to hotel general manager, then to a hotel management company’s corporate office.  I traveled full time for a couple of years, and I do mean full time: I didn’t even have an apartment.

After I switched my career into IT, I met up with the love of my life, Erika.  She went to work for an airline, and airline jobs come with unbelievable travel benefits.  We flew all over the world for $10-$20 per flight, often first class.

These days, I prefer not to travel more than a week per month because Erika’s waiting back home for me here in Chicago.  Therefore, my travel routines look a little more rushed – take my Germany trip next week, all times local:

• Saturday 6PM – leave Chicago on a flight
• Sunday 10AM – arrive in Munich, try to get acclimated to time zone changes
• Monday – present in Munich during the day, then grab dinner and catch a flight to Cologne.  Get to hotel at 9pm.
• Tuesday – present in Cologne, then grab dinner and catch a flight to Berlin.  Get to hotel at 9pm.
• Wednesday – present in Berlin, then grab dinner and catch a flight to Vienna.  Get to hotel at 9pm.
• Thursday – present in Vienna, thankfully get one night without travel.
• Friday 9AM – leave Vienna, stop in Dusseldorf
• Friday 11AM – thanks to the magic of jumping time zones, arrive back home in Chicago completely exhausted

Me in San Francisco

This kind of travel isn’t fun at all – it’s tiring even when everything goes flawlessly.  Unfortunately, it never goes flawlessly, and some of my travel highlights include losing my ATM card in Mexico, getting food poisoning in Paris, crashing a laptop in Sweden, getting all my clothes soaking wet in London, and on and on.  I try to prepare as much as I can to lessen the pain.

How I Plan My Trips

I try to avoid layovers when I’m planning my flights.  Every time you change planes, you increase the chances that bad things will happen; your bags might not make the switch, weather might pop up in that middle airport, or delays might cause you to miss your connection.  Employers these days have policies about taking the cheapest flight no matter what, without regard to flight cost, but I can usually work around that.  I write something like, “The nonstop flight is $150 more than the cheapest one with a layover, but it’s worth the gamble here because I’ve got an event to attend first thing in the morning.  I can’t afford to get delayed by a missed connection – we’ll miss the entire event.”

I stick with my main airline or its partners as often as possible because airlines treat frequent fliers better.  When you’re elite, your bag is among the first ones off the plane, you get preferential treatment during boarding, and you can get bumped up a class if there’s space available.  To learn more about how the reward game works, check out FlyerTalk, a forum site loaded with tips on how to get to elite levels fast.  If you’re on the cusp of hitting elite, but you won’t make it before the year ends, read their mileage run forum.  Readers post cheap, long flights that rack up lots of miles for very little cost, thereby ensuring you make elite.

My favorite airline isn’t always the one with the cheapest rate, so I’ve been known to tweak my arrival/departure dates & times in order to make my airline the cheapest choice.  If I’m doing a conference from Tuesday to Friday, and my airline isn’t the cheapest choice for a Monday night and Friday night flight, I’ll switch to Monday morning or Saturday morning flights to see if that makes a difference.  I prefer early morning departures because weather hasn’t mucked up the day’s flight schedule yet.

I don’t usually have much of a choice when it comes to my hotels or car rentals – that’s dictated by my employer – but sign up for the frequent flier rewards on those no matter what.  They rack up much faster than you’d expect.

How I Pack

I look at my itinerary and try to narrow down my schedule to one pair of shoes.  If I have to wear a blue Quest shirt for a particular event, I’ll try to coordinate the rest of my outfits on that trip to match, thereby letting me survive with just brown shoes.  If I have to wear a black PASS shirt, same idea – set up all my clothes so I can just wear black shoes.  This one decision determines whether I can do the trip with a carryon bag or if I have to check my luggage.  If my flights involve a layover and I have to check my bags, then I’ll bring a carryon too, because I don’t want to worry about arriving without my bags.

Buy good luggage – not expensive luggage, just good luggage.  The stuff you find at big-box discount stores isn’t made well and falls apart after a few trips.  Check out FlyerTalk’s travel products forum for mind-boggling discussions of the lightest bags and how to pack them.  For example, here’s how to pack a suit jacket into a carryon without wrinkling it too badly – a trick I’ve used on transatlantic flights:

Inside my checked bag, I put instructions in big print on where to send the bag if it gets lost.  I print them out on an 8×11 sheet of paper and set them on top of all the clothes, saying, “IF THIS LUGGAGE IS FOUND, PLEASE SEND TO…” and list my home address.  I don’t bother with my trip itinerary – I don’t have good luck with luggage catching up to me on a multi-city trip.

How I Work on the Road

I tried carrying just my iPad to TechEd this year, and that was a failure. Almost as soon as I got into the airport, I got a T-SQL question from the guys at StackOverflow, and I would have been able to solve it immediately if I’d had SQL Server with me. Several times during the week, I said to myself, “Dammit, this would be so much easier if I had this one file.” There’s solutions to put all your files in the cloud, but TechEd attendees will recall that the cloud failed us more than a few times during the week too.

SQL Server Cooks in Germany

There’s a few iPhone and iPad apps that make travel a lot easier:

• 1Password – syncs with the Mac 1Password app, so I’ve always got my passwords on the go. Great for security – generates extremely strong passwords for each web site. Not cheap, but makes security really easy.
• GoodReader – excellent document viewer with built-in library. I put my PDF ebooks in here for reference, but I don’t usually read from this when I’m on the road. I prefer reading magazines until the plane hits 10,000 feet, at which point I switch to working or playing games.
• RememberTheMilk (free) – companion to RememberTheMilk.com, which stores all my tasks in one place.
• Shanghai Mahjong ($.99) – iPad/iPhone game. I seem to have a new favorite game every few months.
• TripIt (free) – companion to TripIt.com, which stores all my travel plans in one place. Just forward your confirmation emails to them, and they parse out all of the details.
• Yelp (free) – business directory with reviews. Restaurants conveniently located near tourists are almost always horrendous. They don’t have to be good, because they don’t have to win your business twice. They just have to get you in the door once, and then repeat that over and over with thousands of tourists. Avoid ‘em with Yelp.

How I Travel

Once I hit the road, I’ve got a binary philosophy; either things matter, or they don’t.

Sounds stupid, right?  Bear with me.

When I’m hungry, I either want to just eat, or I want to have an experience.  There’s nothing in between.  If I’m in a hotel on the road, getting ready to do a day-long seminar, I’ll eat breakfast at the most convenient location.  I don’t care what’s on the menu, I don’t care how bad the service is, and I’m not concerned with the ambiance.  My goal is to get fed, and to be the most pleasant human being possible during that transaction.  Someone else is taking care of me, and I want to show my appreciation for them making my life easier.  They didn’t aspire to work in the food service industry at an airport hotel, and a few moments of kindness will make their lives better.

When I’ve got the time and I want an experience, then I put effort into planning things out.  I open up the Yelp app on my iPhone, check reviews for local (not chain) restaurants, and do some comparison shopping.  I learn what the restaurant specializes in before I arrive, and I know what menu items to avoid.  I go in with wide eyes, take my time, and savor what I’m experiencing.

I approach everything in travel with that same binary mentality.  Pick your battles – not every experience on the road can be eating at WD-50 or taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower.

The most important thing, though, is to take care of yourself.  When you’re traveling for fun, sure, you can abuse yourself by staying out late every night, drinking the bar out of Jägermeister, and walking around mumbling during conference sessions.  When you’re doing this for a living and you have to present yourself in front of customers, then you have to get enough water, sleep, and downtime to project a good image.  It’s tempting to stay out with the gang and go crazy, and I’ll let myself have one night like that at the very end of a long trip, but do that every night, and you won’t get paid to travel for too long.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Saturday

It’s Labor Day weekend.  I would love to hang out and relax, but I have a plane to catch.  I pack my laptop bag and a single large suitcase.  I’d love to take a carryon too, because it’d be a nightmare if my luggage didn’t arrive with me.  I’m going to be checking the suitcase on five different flights, so the odds of losing it are pretty good, and if it gets lost, they won’t be able to get it to the right city on the right day.  I gamble and skip the carryon because it’ll be a pain to shuffle that many bags around Europe.  (That gamble pays off.)

At 2pm, we leave the house.  Five minutes into the drive, I get an email saying I need to bring a suit.  I don’t own a suit (never have) but I race back home to grab ties.  We make it to the airport in time, and I board a nine hour flight from Houston to London in coach.  I’m productive for the first few hours, banging away on presentations on my laptop, and take a sleeping pill to catch some Z’s.  It’s my only chance to get rest in the next day.  I can’t get comfortable, though – coach seats for a 6’3″ guy don’t work – and I only get a few minutes of fitful rest.

Sunday

I meet up with fellow Questie Heather Eichman in London and we board the one-hour flight to Dusseldorf.  When we arrive, we meet up with Cristoph and Oliver from PASS Gemany.  They’re absolutely hilarious, and they’re just great guys.  We have a laugh-filled ride to the hotel, which they warn us is of dubious quality.  Who cares, when the company is this good?

After we get our hotel keys, a maid offers to guide me to my room because I’m lost.  (There’s no signs.)  We start walking toward another building when she suddenly starts screaming.  I turn around, and after several seconds of screaming and gesturing, I figure out there’s a bee on my back.  I wave and dance around to her enjoyment, and we both get a good laugh out of it.

Cristoph and Oliver warn us that the hotel isn’t fancy, but I thought it was cute.  I’ve stayed in much, much worse hotels in the States.  There’s no iron, so my clothes won’t look too good, but everybody’s wearing shorts and t-shirts anyway.

We head down to the hotel beer garden (WOOHOO) and meet up with Rushabh Mehta, one of the presenters.  We immediately hit it off and talk for quite a while about SQL Server communities.  The waitstaff ignores us despite much waving, but we manage to score a beer after maybe twenty minutes.  I’m exhausted, though, so I retire to the room to take a one-hour nap before dinner.

Dinner with the DBAs was the highlight of the entire trip.  I won’t go into details here, but these Germans are the most hospitable people I’ve ever met.  We had a truly wonderful time.

Monday

The hotel has no hot water.

I hoped that it was just my wing of the hotel, or that it was because I’d woken up a little later than everyone else, but it happened to everybody.  Ouch.

The PASS guys have their own morning meeting, so a few of us pile into a car and head off to the next hotel where PASSCamp is being held in the hopes of getting a hot shower there.  The stunning hotel does not let us down.  I get a warm shower and a quick nap before the afternoon events start.

My presentation went well, and I meet even more DBAs that I could talk to for hours.  The more I talk to the attendees, the presenters and the PASS board members, the more I wish I could stay for the 3-day BI track, but no luck – I’m scheduled for more presentations in other cities.

We have dinner and great conversations, and I would love to stay up with these great guys and drink beer, but we have a car coming to pick us up long before dawn to whisk us off to the airport, so it’s off to bed at 10pm.

I wanted to avoid medication, and I was completely exhausted, so I skipped the sleeping pill and just hit the sack.  I regretted that mistake about four hours later when I woke up, wide awake.  It was too late to take a sleeping pill – I only had a few hours before I needed to wake up – so I stayed up.

Tuesday

Wake up, shower, pack the bags, check out, drag the bags to the waiting taxi, ride to an ATM, withdraw Euros to pay the driver, ride to the airport, go through security, board a plane to London, go through security, pick up the bags, and then it gets interesting.

Cabs in London are expensive.  Really expensive.  So to save money, we take the express train from Heathrow to Paddington Station, board a subway and transfer to another subway.

All with luggage.

During the morning rush hour.

After over an hour of dragging bags and elbowing for space in the Tube, we make it out of the subway station to find that it’s raining.  We walk a couple of blocks to the office and set the bags down.  It’s barely 10am, and already we need showers and fresh clothes, but it’s not happening – we have to work.  We grab coffee and muffins from Starbucks and sit down at laptops.

I’m an architecture buff, and London has so much to see.  The closest I get to tourism, though, is a shot of the Gherkin through the Quest office window.  I can tell you all about the Gherkin.  I had pictures of it on my desktop wallpaper for a while.  I would love to see it in person, walk up to it, maybe go up to the observation deck, but that photo is as close as I’ll get this trip.

After a few of hours of email and presentation prep, we drag the bags downstairs, find a taxi, ride to the hotel and deplete Heather’s stash of pound coins just to pay the driver.  We don’t actually have enough money to pay him, but he doesn’t want to drive to the nearest ATM – he would rather take less money than have to put up with the London traffic.

I check into the swanky hotel – that’s right, air conditioning and an iron!  One of them even works, but it’s the wrong one for this particular part of the trip.  I’ve only got a few minutes before I have to run back downstairs and find an ATM to pay the next cab, so I settle for the shirt that looks the least wrinkled.  I go back downstairs, walk two blocks to an ATM, then we board a cab to the meeting.

My presentation goes well.

After the presentation, I excuse myself and catch a cab back to the hotel.  A Quest exec is there and I’d love to stay to talk to him, but I’m a mental mess after sleeping only 4 hours in the last 40+ hours, so odds are I’d sound like an idiot anyway.  I leave before I have the chance to say something stupid.

Upon arriving at the hotel at 9pm, I have horrible stomach cramps.  I try to think back about what I might have eaten to cause food poisoning, and I realize the only thing I ate the entire day was a single muffin.

I call room service again and again, but don’t get an answer.  The hotel desk just keeps forwarding me back there.  I walk down to the restaurant, and the hostess says no, she can’t take a room service order, just keep calling and someone will answer.  I leave the speakerphone on continuously ringing, and eventually they pick up.  I order a chicken caesar salad, a small bowl of soup and a bottle of water – safe stuff for a dangerous stomach.

Only it’s not – the salad arrives about half an hour later and it’s covered with anchovies.  I pick those off and wolf the rest down along with a sleeping pill.  Not taking any chances tonight.

Wednesday

I have a couple of hours before my car arrives at 11am to take me to the airport for my next event, so I wander around the Tower Bridge shooting pictures with my iPhone.  (I lost my digital camera just before this trip.)  I pick up some chocolates for a friend, and then it’s back to the hotel.

I have a one hour ride to the airport, then grab lunch at an airport restaurant after going through tight international security.  Our flight changes gates at the last minute, and then takes forever to get off the ground.  The one hour flight takes over two hours, with plenty of wild turbulence.  I have to hang on to my laptop to keep it from bouncing onto the floor.

We touch down in Geneva and go through the most surreal passport check I’ve ever had: he didn’t even look at our passports, just waved us past.  Uh, okay.  While waiting at baggage claim, Heather recognizes the woman next to us as Melanie Lynskey – Rose from the TV show Two and a Half Men.

We drag the luggage through the airport and into the train station, buy two round trip tickets to Lausanne, drag the luggage to the train, and throw it up on the overhead racks because the train is full.  The 45-minute ride to Lausanne is nice – good scenery, very quiet and smooth train.

We arrive in Lausanne and drag our luggage over to the nearest ATM in order to get Swiss Francs for the cab ride to the hotel.  (The hotel doesn’t have a shuttle.)  We head outside to the taxi stand and thank our lucky stars that it’s got a roof, because it’s raining.

We suddenly realize the cab driver may not be happy when we try to hand him a $50 bill, the smallest denomination dispensed by the airport ATM.  When he clicks on the meter and it starts – STARTS – at $7, we relax.  Thank goodness for the high cost of living in Switzerland.  A 2km cab ride costs us nearly $20.

After nine hours of travel (and remember, I’m still in the EU) I finally set my luggage down.

The hotel is in a residential neighborhood, and there’s no hotel restaurant.  We ask the hotel desk clerk for the nearest restaurant, and he recommends a steak place three blocks away.  He gives us not one but two umbrellas to aid in our journey (because it’s still raining), walks us outside, and points to the right street to make sure we get there.  He rocks.

The restaurant rocks even more: they have steak tartare.  The waitstaff are funny, friendly, and go out of their way to make it an enjoyable dining experience.  Big tip.

During the discussion, though, I find out that a coworker suggested that I’m tacking on an extra day at the end of this trip on the company dime, and he thinks I’m slacking off on this trip, abusing company funds.  I hit the roof.  I would love to kick this guy in the balls, but he clearly doesn’t have any if he’s not willing to say this to my face before he says it to high-ranking executives.  I decide to settle for writing a blog post about the joys of international travel instead.

The rain stops long enough for us to walk back to the hotel.  I try to avoid medication, but I give up at 1am when I’m still wide awake.  I have to keep the windows open because it’s so hot in the room without air conditioning, but it’s so noisy outside that I can’t fall asleep.  I take my last sleeping pill.

Thursday (Today)

The hotel room is so small that the shower is visible through both the bathroom window and the bedroom window, so I can’t leave the windows open while I take a shower.  Since I don’t have air conditioning, the tiny room is a steamy sauna by the time I get out.  After dressing, I open the windows again, but at that point I’m sweaty from the heat.  Argh.

Good news and bad news: the good news is that I don’t have to worry about the iron heating up the room, because there’s no irons here or at the front desk.  The bad news: my clothes are a wrinkled mess.  Next time I’ll bring a travel iron.

We eat a continental breakfast at the hotel, then catch up on emails before heading out to catch a cab to the hotel where we’re holding the customer meeting.  They didn’t put us up at that hotel because it’s too expensive, so we’ll be dragging our briefcases and promo stuff out to find the place.

I’m doing a couple of presentations today, dinner with the DBAs, and then back to the hotel.  Hopefully my sleeping schedule has adjusted enough that I can make it without sleeping pills.

Tomorrow is a free day in Lausanne to make up for traveling & working the entire Labor Day weekend, and then Saturday morning I start the long travel process to get back to the States.  It’ll be a cab to the train station, a train to the Geneva airport, a flight from Geneva to London, a short layover, and a nine-hour flight from London to Houston in coach class.  I’ll have one day at home with Erika, and then it’s off to New York City and LA for the next presentations and meetings.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but the travel is nowhere near as fun and easy as it might look on my Twitter stream.

The travel part sucks, but the people make it all worthwhile.  I have a long list of names that I’ll never forget, and I’d love to type them all in here, but if you’ll excuse me, I have to go catch a cab in the rain.

Hopefully the nice guy at the desk will loan us an umbrella again.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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We’ve packed up the Honda and we’re heading out this morning on a road trip of epic proportions: Just over 5,000 miles. Erika, Ernie (our miniature Schnauzer) and I are driving from Houston to Memphis today, overnighting there. On Sunday we’re continuing up to Muskegon, Michigan to spend some time with Dad and Caryl, my stepmom.

Houston to Memphis to Muskegon to Aliso Viejo to Houston

Next up on the itinerary: a slow drive across the country to Aliso Viejo, California to the Quest offices. I’ve got some meetings there in early August for the LiteSpeed v5 RTM party.

Finally, we’ll drive through Arizona and New Mexico to get back home to Houston.

Shortly after arriving back in Houston, I’ll fly back out to Michigan again, this time to speak at the West Michigan SQL User Group and Detroit SQL User Group.  (If only these meetings would have been two weeks prior, I might have been able to expense this whole thing!  Wouldn’t that be hilarious.)

This whole thing will take between two and a half to four weeks, depending on how we mix it up.  We have a couple of alternate plans in case we want to spend more time in a specific area.

Our only concern: we won’t be able to go to as many cool restaurants since we’ll have Ernie with us.  Ah, well – that’ll keep the road trip budget down, at least.  Speaking of budget, gas prices were enough of a concern to make us take the Honda instead of my beloved Jeep Wrangler.  33mpg versus 15, hmmm, lemme think about that – no.

You can track our progress on BrightKite or on Flickr, and I’ll blog periodically.  I’ll still be working (love ya, AT&T) so I’ll be doing work-related blog entries on here too as usual.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

I used to live out of planes and hotels (literally, I worked for a hotel company) but I haven’t traveled much for the past five years.  This afternoon I had an ugly experience that reminded me of the sad truth of long-distance travel: crappy customer service can wreck your trip, and great customer service is worth extra money.

I tried to check in via the web around 1pm for my 3:45pm US Airways flight back from the Quest offices in Orange County, CA.  The web site informed me that something had changed about my flight, and that I needed to call the US Airways customer service number.  I called, gave them my confirmation number, and got placed on hold.  A few minutes later, the voice returned and informed me that my flight had been cancelled.

Period.

I waited to hear the next words out of her mouth, because I’m thinking, this is typical, right?  These things happen.  It’s a big company.  They must have a system for this, a checklist that defines what step happens next.  I know things break, and I’m cool with that.  When I’m traveling and things break, I’m really cool when it happens on the ground.  It’s when things break in the air that I get fidgety.

But she doesn’t keep going.  To her, that was it.

I prompted her by asking, “Okay, what next?  Is there a later flight, and can you rebook me?”  She put me on hold for a few more minutes to go find out.

While I was on hold, I started wondering what she’d done the first time she went on hold.  Was it that hard to find out the flight was cancelled?  Why make me wait that long and not have an answer ready for what the next question would be?  Did she think I was just going to stay in Orange County for the rest of my life?  Had any customer in the entire history of US Airways ever been told their flight was cancelled and simply responded with, “Okey dokey, sounds like we’re done here!  Thanks!”

She came back and said the next flight would be the next day.  I said okay, no problem, go ahead and book me.  She asked to put me on hold again, but I asked if she could skip putting me on hold, because my cell phone battery was almost dead.  She put me on hold anyway.

When she came back, she said I was all set to fly out the next day.  I asked which hotel they were putting me up at, and that’s when things went south pretty fast. To be honest, I didn’t expect them to put me up in a hotel, but I was cheesed off enough that they’d cancelled the flight without calling me, without rebooking me on another flight, and without seeming like they had any semblance of a Plan B when I called.

She started talking to someone else in the same room, escalated it to a supervisor, and didn’t do a particularly good job of holding her finger over the microphone.  Actually, to be honest, I think she was passing the microphone around to the different people in the room, because I heard them pretty clearly.  One of them said something to the effect of, “He said his battery was almost dead, right?  Hang up on him.”

And they did.

Rather than call ‘em back, I called the Quest travel department, who performed like rock stars.  Within the first two minutes of the call, she identified that all of the flights out of Orange County, LAX and Long Beach were booked, with the exception of an LAX flight that I couldn’t make in time.  She got me booked on a 6:15 AM flight, booked me into an airport hotel, emailed the updated confirmation info to me and asked if there was anything else she could do to make it easier.

All in less time than the US Airways rep had me on hold before she told me the flight was cancelled.

The taxi dropped me off at the Hyatt, and it turned out that the cab went to the wrong Hyatt.  Jessica at the Hyatt Regency Irvine front desk said no problem, called the Hyatt Regency Newport Beach, got the reservation moved, kept the same discounted corporate rate that Quest had at the other Hyatt, and kept apologizing the whole time about my cancelled flight.

I got into my room, called down for room service, and the great service kept going.  The operator cheerfully greeted me by name, and she told me when the food would be ready – but she did it in a way that I rarely hear.  She said, “We’re running about 30 minutes right now, so your food should be there just before 4 PM.”  Usually, I hear things like, “It’ll be half an hour to an hour depending on how busy they are.”  They – what do you mean they?  It’s you.  You’re they.  At the Hyatt, there was no “they” – it was “we.”  I love that.  And you know the food showed up in 25 minutes, because that’s the kind of operation they’re running.  Wow.

So yeah, I’m stuck in California for another night, and I miss Erika and Ernie, and I wish I was home sleeping in my own bed.  But if it wasn’t for the happy folks I dealt with after the wackos at US Airways, things could be a lot worse.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

I scanned and uploaded our 2001 vacation pictures from Rome and from Mexico. Nothing amazing in there, just your typical vacation photos. I wanted to scan ‘em in before I upgraded my home computer to Vista because I’m not sure my scanner will work with that new OS.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts