SQL Saturdays

At the beginning of April I started moving - because a 90+ minute commute each way is just too much! Home is still in the hands of horizontal storage and looks likely to stay that way for another few weeks at least, which means that there's another few weeks of having thin trails and paths through mountains of tubs, boxes, and bags of "stuff", and the perpetual danger of being hit by falling debris dislodged by a careless cat!

So two weeks ago we loaded the cat trays with food, super-cleaned the litter, and escaped on Friday night to drive to Rochester, NY. Five and a half hours later we arrives at the hotel ... how come the weather forecast never said anything about the rainstorm between Syracuse and Rochester? Right next to a Red Lobster - convenient!

Next morning I check out and drive to the RIT for the event. Tola takes off for yarn raiding!
Courses on PowerShell, Extended Events, the Apply statement, Wait Stats, and a double period of Kathi Kellenberger's Window Functions. Great information, leavened with helping of chat with the vendors and some nice lunch left everyone somewhat brain-dead by the final gathering at 5:15 and, after raffles were drawn, we staggered out to find cars. I found a lot of yarn to drive with - !

So another five hours drive home .... again, nobody warned us of the horrendous rainstorm coming out of Pennsylvania into New York state. Thunder, lightning, and heaps of rain! We get home around midnight. Feed the cats and straight to bed because on Sunday I get  to drive again! This time to South Plainfield in NJ for a Linux Admin course! Just two hours each way and five hours of course. I manage to get home around nine pm. Eat and crash. Monday morning I'm wondering if there actually was a weekend!

A week goes by. Tola's birthday caused some celebration. She got a little Acer Switch 10 ... After charging it up it appears to be a very nice little machine - has Windows 8.1 pre-installed but nothing's perfect, and its going to be used almost exclusively for iTunes. Take off the demo version of MS Office and the McAfee anti-virus unpaid system with all their prompts for money and install Avast or suchlike and it's usable.

Another week and I'm back on the SQL Saturday trail - I'm writing this in New York. This one's popular enough to have crashed the SQL Saturday web site! I don't know how many people are here - three hundred or more, compared to the two hundred in Rochester. So the nice things are not just the learning, which is fun, but also meeting up with the people I've met at other SQL Saturday events and the people I used to work with. This time I met some people who took the same courses last September with Brent Ozar in Philadelphia, some guys I used to work with, and a whole heap of speakers who I've seen several times - we all get to know each other and it's nice to see familiar friendly faces.

Coming up soon are Philadelphia on June 6th and Albany on July 25th. #411 is in Cambridge on September 12th, #440 is Pittsburgh on October 3rd, and #446 in Portland, OR, on October 24th. Cambridge would be nice; Protland is almost a requirement as my wife's family lives in the area.

Next time I'll start doing a series of SSIS Tips!

TTFN