The SQL Doctor is In (Real In)

Awesome, another person I was hoping to see as an MVP.  I really like what he has done, with his blog: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/default.aspx, especially his interviews, and not just the one with me :)

Just a quick announcement that a good friend and PASS colleague has joined the MVP ranks.  If you don't know him, he is on the board of directors for PASS (https://www.sqlpass.org/about/Pages/Directors.aspx), has a blog here (http://devplanet.com/blogs/memydatabaseandi/) and does lots of other stuff locally and otherwise for the SQL community. 

Congratulations, dude...

Ah...Time to get back to normal.  Work on the book is winding down and I am no longer spending every free moment on it.  I only have 2 chapters left from copy edit, and the rest is no more than 20 hours total.  So as Bender says:

Tonight I got back in the forums, and made this post.  I have a lot of ideas to go through for articles, blogs, giveaways, etc.  Some of them are personal, about my family, or even the weeks I have spent as a slightly handicapped person at Disney and TechEd, on occasional withdrawals from meds, and my daughter's graduation and leaving for college. 

Others are more technical in nature, including a hopeful series of discussing why all that crazy theory is needed, and excerpts from the new book, as well as adding material when I discovered I missed something.  I also am thinking about a newsletter for book readers, including some fun stuff just for people who own the book.  That plus I have a load of new gadgets to review...

I also have several giveaways in mind as Microsoft has given me 3 copies of MSDN to give away, and I will have many books.  First up will be a Twitter announcement one, where I am going to give several books away randomly to every person who announces the book on their twitter somehow (details forthcoming on that and others...).  Got ideas?  Share away..

I am copy editing, and I have this as a real world example of locks...

"Locks act as a message to other processes that a resource is being used, or at least probably being used. Think of a railroad crossing sign. When the bar crosses the road, it acts as a lock to tell you not to drive across the tracks initially, because the train is going to use the resource. Even if the train stops and never reaches the road, the bar comes down, and the lights flash like it is Christmas at Disney World. This lock can be ignored (as can SQL Server locks), but it’s generally not advisable to do so, since if the train does come you may not have the ability to go back to Disney World, except perhaps to the Haunted Mansion. (Ignoring locks isn’t usually as messy as ignoring a train-crossing signal, but you could be creating the system that controls that warning signal. Ignore locks—ouch.)"

Do you get it?  Ignoring locks is dangerous?  Well? I probably shouldn't blog or write so long on one day...but I will be finished soon... And Sunday is Father's Day....My favorite day!

Next week is Tech Ed Developers, and I will be there working at the OLTP demo station from:

Tuesday 11:45 – 2:45
Wednesday 2:30 – 6:00
Thursday 11:45 – 2:45
Friday 11:45 – 2:45

All times Eastern Daylight Saving Time and a little bit approximate at this point.  Please stop by and say howdy!  I don't exactly yet know what I will be doing completely, but it will be fun, never the less.

After that I have a few other speaking engagements coming up:

Nashville SQL User's Group - Late Summer - Doing some session in concert with my book release (hopefully doing some special stuff that time too.  Stay tuned for that announcement)
Devlink (www.devlink.net) - August 22, 23 - Doing a double session on Database Design with Paul Nielsen
PASS (www.sqlpass.org) - Nov 19-21 - Doing the same session with Paul, just condensed into a single session

I will be back in the forums soon, and on this blog and my personal website (drsql.org) too as the principal writing for the book will be finished tomorrow, and rewrites in a week or so.  After that, it is a downhill journey to the finish line.

So come by next week and let me know you are reading the blog, book, or whatever. 

(cross-posted to http://sqlblog.com/blogs/louis_davidson/default.aspx)

Well, I started twittering tonight.  A few people had mentioned it to me as a thing I should do, and so here we are.  I am finishing up my book in the next few weeks, and going to Tech Ed, Disney World, and all sorts of stuff, so why not.  If you want to see my twitter page, it is at:

www.twitter.com/drsql

I will try to post occasionally what is going on in my life, particularly when it comes to writing, speaking, etc, but I will also try to twitter occasionally about other stuff.  This is a weird phenomena, I will admit.

You can get an RSS feed of my twitters here:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14752841.rss

More importantly, send me an email with your address or post a comment here and I will follow your twitters.  Perhaps sometime we will meet up in the real world or something....nah.

Well, yeah.  I have been absent.  No blogs for a long while, no articles, very few forum posts.  I even missed my annual April Fool's post (which I at one time had a great one planned, but I forgot it, prompting my use of One Note and One Note Mobile from now on to store anything creative I come up with) because I am in the final month or so of writing my next book. 

The story, if you care of course, if not just look away, is that I finally have got to the "new" chapter of the book, and to some heavy revising of another chapter.  I hate being absent because it feels bad to be out of the stream of output for people to see.  As an author I am constantly trying to market myself in a way that isn't obnoxious, and is beneficial to you.  And most of my gimmicks have fallen flat, especially my contests (the hidden message contest was a terrible bust!)  I started this blog right around the time I was finishing up my last book, and I was really strong with it for quite a while, but sometimes it just gets to be a bit much.  I remember back during that book I vanished from the newsgroups then too. 

One of the reasons I look forward to finishing the book is to get back to "incremental" output.  The blog is cathartic.  I can talk about goofy stuff, good stuff, give a short tip, or a long article.  It is nice to see some quick feedback to your work, and the book doesn't give me any quick feedback.  It will be 4 or 5 months before the first book hits the sales channels, and another 2 - 6 months before I really know how well it is doing.  Amazon numbers rare really the only indicator that I have of overall sales, and it isn't that easy to judge.   I tend to hear from 20-40 people over the life of the book directly how the feel, a few from reviews, and my favorite, from a person at a conference.  A compliment from a random stranger is kind of the best feeling of them all.  I know that people I know from conferences know of my book, most of them I have given a free copy.  When a person drops 40 bucks on a book and thanks you for the book, that is what you are working for.  It is like the good feeling from a nice comment on a blog times a thousand. 

This week I am at the MVP Summit.  It is already 1000 times better than last year, because last year, after dinner, I came back to the room and didn't leave for a day and a half.  The entire month of April was pretty terrible actually, because a few weeks later I was in a car accident that is going to keep hurting for several more years.  But this isn't a whiny blog, it is a fun one.

Over the next month, I will be at the Nashville launch event on May 1, then at TechEd Developers in June 3-6, speaking at the Nashville SQL Server Users Group meeting in July or so, then two other things I am waiting to hear about.  And my sqlblog.com blog...it is coming back strong too.   Oh yeah, and back to the forums too. 

It might sound like a lot, but frankly it is much less than writing a book :)  I didn't do any writing this previous weekend, and I felt weird.  I just bounced around my house, playing Nintendo, working on the yard, watching TV.  It felt like a full week instead of 48 hours.

On Friday, February 15, the Nashville SQL Server Users Group had its first meeting.  It was actually the very first meeting of the rejuvenated SQL Server group that had more or less dissolved over the past few years.  But a few of us got together and realized that we wanted to have a user's group that we could attend here locally, and so the group was reborn.

Turnout was spectacular for a first meeting of any kind really, with the meeting being held at the offices of Robert Half International in downtown Nashville.  Approximately 100 people were in attendance, which for one thing meant that the pizza was pretty much all eaten by the end of the meeting, but also meant that this was a tremendously well received first meeting for any type of group, much less a SQL Server user's group that had floundered away a few years back.  Hungry for pizza, hungry for knowledge.

Luckily for our first meeting, we brought out a very popular speaker, and a coauthor of mine, SQL Server MVP Kevin Kline, who gave an excellent rundown of the Top 10 Features that are coming in SQL Server 2008.

As you can see from the pictures, almost every seat was filled, which is quite a big deal, since in most conferences/user groups, there is a strict, unenforced "chair-between" policy.

Kevin's talk covered:

1. SQL Improvements
2. Developer Improvements
3. Reporting Services Improvements
4. Compression
5. Datatypes (like the new Date and Time types)
6. Security Improvements
7. Resource Governor
8. Auditing
9. Analysis Services Performance Improvements
10. Multi-Server management

You can download the slides from here, along with a white paper that Kevin had written up on this for his employer, Quest.

Our next meeting will be on April 4th, 2008, a Friday at 11:30 (location to be announce) where Joe Webb, another SQL Server MVP from here in Nashville will give a presentation on Tips & Tricks for Writing Better Queries.  Joe is a great speaker so please come on down (or up, depending on where you live and where the meeting ends up,) and here him speak.  We will also have another member of the group present another tip or trick that they have up their sleeve. 

If you are interested in attending, watch http://nashville.sqlpass.org for updates on the exact location, and register if you want to get updates sent to you.  If you are interested in speaking, send an email to shelton.dickson@decisionsource.com.  He will get you hooked up. 

Of course, I am presenting a very pretty mighty perfect picture of the day, and for the most part, it is true.  The only real snafu of the day was that the first (and only) projector that was used wouldn't work.  In the picture, notice that the only thing out of focus (more or less) is the picture on the screen.  Despite having the collective audio visual clubs of half of the schools in Nashville from the past 20 years in one room, not a one of us had the ability to get the projector going (even though some tried, and others shouted out helpful tips like "see if the lens cap is off").  But thanks to some Southern hospitality, another projector was acquired from a company in the same building and we were off and running.

See you on April 4!

Note: I apologize for the quality of the pictures.  For future meetings I will be toting along a far better camera than my Motorola Q phone camera so I can provide blogs and pictures for the website.

If you don't want to spoil your reading of my book next time, look away.  I am going to spill the beans on one of my quotes because it is funny, and probably the best quote I have gotten yet.

The chapter is about security, and in the chapter I basically outline some strategies for securing the stuff in your database from outside eyes that don't need to see it.  At the start of every chapter I include a quote of some sort, or in one chapter, a Dilbert comic (the mauve one, my personal favorite).  For security, I was looking at random quotes when I found:

"Today you can go to a gas station and find the cash register open and the toilets locked. They must think toilet paper is worth more than money."
— Joey Bishop

If you don't know who Joey Bishop was, check Wikipedia here and here.  Admittedly his friends were far more popular than him.

For the quote however, how true is this?  In every office building it is often harder for the average person to get office supplies than it is to access important, even damaging, personal information.  In my home city of Nashville, TN thieves broke into the Election Commission and stole laptops with all of the names of the voters for our city (Thieves nab Nashville voter rolls).  First off, what the devil were the people thinking that even allowed this data to reside on a portable device, much less just sitting on a desk?!?  The Election Administrator was quoted as saying "Thank goodness they didn't get the whole Social," all they got was the name, address, phone number and last four digits of our Social Security numbers.

My oh my...

Ok, so I am going to promise that this won't become the home shopping club blog, or even the deal of the century blog, but this amazes me.  I just inherited a computer (see previous blog for where it came from) which wasn't bad. Pentium 4 2.5 GHz, enough to serve up my basic needs (mostly to store my video/music for my Zunes, and my Tivos, and doing some work on occasion), but it only had a 40 GB hard disk and 256 MB of RAM.  Luckily the computer I was replacing (It died a fairly painful death...) used the same kind of RAM (PC3200) so I could bump it up to 1.5 GB, but 40 GB is a drop in the bucket to my multimedia needs (my Zune has 80 GB for heaven's sake)

So I went shopping at my local Circuit City, and found a WD 500 GB drive for 119! 

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Western-Digital-500GB-My-Book-Essential-Edition-2-0-External-Hard-Drive-WDH1U5000N/sem/rpsm/oid/193193/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

This is just an amazing price to me.  It is brand new, basic drive that I will use to store Tivo files and other media, with copies of the data stored on some other USB drives I have too (I love USB!). 

And to think that my first drive had 20 MB, and I wasn't really sure what I would do with all that space.

Note: This was written before the news about Ken Henderson, but I am just getting around to posting it now that I am home from the trip that inspired me to write about the same subject.  I know how sad and shocking of a time that is for his family and friends from my experience with my own father.  Clearly if this is a shock to us all.  I didn't know him that well, though I shook his hand after his PASS forum that I blogged about here.  I may not have seen eye to eye with him on some topics, but he was a very nice guy who did a tremendous amount for the SQL Server community that I am a member of. 

There are just some things that you can never be prepared for.  Being abducted by aliens who probe you for information about your government, for example (dirty minds...).  The other, more real one is death.  My father-in-law passed away on Friday morning after a many year battle with kidney problems and other issues. Obit is here, the last one listed.  He was a pretty great man that I had come to love over the years as a guy who I was a lot like.  He loved gadgets and electronics probably even more than I did.  He was the kind of guy who had the first of everything during the prime of his life.  They still have the 1500 pound VCR out in their garage he was proud of being one of the first to have, certainly in Cleveland, TN.

His passing was slow painful process and his actual passing was a blessing for him and for the people taking care of him. The remarkable thing to me was just how unprepared everyone was.  My wife even remarked that she "thought she was ready" for it to happen.  When the actual event occurred it was no different than when a person who was in great health had died.  Everyone seemed shocked.  My actual father had died 12 years ago as he were preparing for the Olympics doing a large share of the logicistics to get the whitewater venue done in the Cherokee National Forest (something I do love to brag about!), and he got sick, developed pneumonia, and died two weeks later.  It is odd, but I think that hit me in pretty much the same way my father-in-law's death hit his family. 

I don't think any of us are ever really prepared for death.  I mean, as a Christian death is generally to be considered a wonderful occasion and we all feel "prepared" for it to happen to us to some extent.  That is a wonderful comfort to us, but it is always excruciatingly painful when death actually arrives to take someone we love.  Even when we know it is better for them to not be in great pain any longer, it still just comes so naturally to mourn the person who has passed.  Perhaps this is just part of my culture, but perhaps not.  It seems that in these times of wonder drugs and such, it is so hard to say final goodbyes. In previous times, people died more regularly.  Both my father and father-in-law had lost infant siblings, which today is usually the cause for a malpractice suit,

Maybe it is my logical mind, but the truth is, when I mourn the loss of my father, I mourn more for me.  I really wish I had had more time to to get to know the person who died.  My father and I never had a chance to have an adult relationship, our relationship passed from Adult Parent-Young Child to Parent-Idiot Teenager to Parent-Dumb Hiney Adult Child, and just barely up to the point of two relative equals who can discuss life on equal legs.  The same goes with my father-in-law we basically had a very man-style relationship. Discuss weather, sports, work, repeat.  Both of them live on in our house in the furniture that they built for us (more from the father-in-law, but my father built a wonderful bookshelf for us,) and everything they have taught us over the years.  Unfortunately neither of them taught their children to do anything other than sit on or at furniture :)

Now, it is time to move on and get back to working on SQL Server...funny how something that overshadows most of my life during normal times can seem so unimportant during these times, but will soon become the most important thing again as I get back to work and writing...

Every year I put together my resolutions, and this year, while a bit delayed, here they are again.  Unlike previous years where I vow to do more and more, this year I am vowing to get life under control. 

1.  Spend enough time with my daughter during her last year of high school and first months of college.  * Yes, I am that age now, though we did start quite early in the process of life that I am not really that old. 

2.  Finish my books. I am about half of the way through the 2008 rewrite, and 1/2 of the way through the dynamic management objects book.  I want to finish both before summer (the first pass at least).  This is a tall order, but very much worth it.  I can't wait to see how this book turns out and how it received.  I had considered giving up writing after the last book, but it has done so well that I wanted to do it again.  Plus, I have more to say about database design.

3.  Get my career on an even better path.  Hopefully my employer doesn't take this the wrong way, but I want to get back on a track to learn and do stuff that I haven't yet done with databases, either relationally, or dimensionally, I don't mind.  My main goal is to keep myself on a track that will keep me working in this field until I am 110 years old.

4.  Help to start a Nashville SQL users group.  Sever of the MVPs and a few other folks who were involved in the previous group are getting together to start a new group together.

5.  Recommit to my PASS volunteering.  There has been so many technical roadblocks to getting my blogging site set up (as well as the rest of the SIG and main sites) that it has just been highly neglected.  I used to do a lot of the work manually and I just couldn't find the time any longer.

6.  Speak at least once or twice this year. Maybe at PASS, probably at Devlink, and definitely at the Nashville user group we are hoping to start.

7.  Post in the forums regularly.  When writing, this can be pushed out of the rotation just because of time, but I really want to keep up my presence there.

8. Change email addresses.  This is a lot more trouble than it seems.  I have used drsql@hotmail.com forever, from back when it was possible to get an email address with hotmail that didn't have numbers in it.  I have a website at drsql.org, and an email address louis@drsql.org, but changing would take a lot of work, not to mention that I would have to change all of the different things that I link to, like newsgroups, forums, readers, etc. 

Oh well, I wanted to say something about doing less, relaxing more, etc, but that would be a big lie, huh?  Maybe in 2009 :)

* If my wife reads this, it goes without saying that resolution #1 is simply a special desire to go out of my way to spend time with her.  Soon she will be just a phone call every once in a while as she moves off  to college.

Yeah, I know, they are over today, but still.  This has been such a busy holidays that i have just not felt like writing or anything.  Just before Christmas we had this big shakeup at my office, and so I have not been near a computer much, other than to shop for goodies, of course. 

Not that it has been a bad Christmas/New Years.  On the contrary, we spend time with our (my wife and my) families, eating good food and seeing friends.  My father in law is getting really feeble, so it was kind of sad in a way, but it was nice overall. 

Today my Volunteers beat the Badgers of Wisconsin in the Outback Bowl, so that was definitely nice.  I still have flashbacks to last years defeat to Penn State when I was sitting in my hotel room at Disney World. 

Anyhow, I hope your holidays have been a blessed event, and that this year will be the best year ever for you.  I know it is a big year for me, as I have about a week to shift from slacker to full speed ahead in the writing process.  SQL Server 2008 will be out in the next six months or so, and so will a new edition of my book.  Not a tremendous rewrite this time, more a cleaning up and adding on for the new 2008 features.  For the most part, the kinds of things that worked with 2005 aren't such an amazing differences, particularly from a design standpoint.  More on that later.  For now, just take it easy, finish off the holiday snacks and get ready to get back to work....

Well, another holiday season is upon us Americans.  I have more to be thankful than I could even go into in such a small space, even considering the fairly terrible year we have had this year (hip problems, nagging family illnesses, our church and its school having to relocate).  We are all healthy, and professionally things have never been better.

Thank you for reading my blogs here on live.com, and over on SQLBlog.com, even if my posting has become more and more sporadic as I get deeper into writing my next books.  If you have my 2005 book, thank you.  If you know someone who does not, there are still 33 shopping days until Christmas :)

My book on the DMV's is still ongoing, and is now scheduled for release sometime mid next year.  I will also be announcing some additional help to work with me in the upcoming weeks, which is pretty exciting for me.  I have gotten a good amount of the book done, but I need a bit of a "push" on some sections.

At the same time, with SQL Server 2008 coming out pretty soon (8 months, perhaps?) it is time to start doing a revision of the database design book.  Unlike previous versions of the book, this is finally going to be a simple evolutionary step, with just some bug fixes (I found a few ugly errors, and a few other people have found a few others, :) minor alterations (I found some clumsy wording that comes from having people who are not terribly technical doing one of the later edits of the book, and updates for the new 2008 features (like date, spatial, and xml datatypes (xml was introduced in 2005, but I am including it this time), change tracking, and any other new features that come out between now and RTM.

If you have any suggestions for me (other than to shut up about normalization :) please email me at drsql@hotmail.com.  Anything you would like to see added, or if you have never purchased a previous edition, what would make you purchase the next version? 

The following is a review of Adam's book that I will be posting to Amazon soon after posting this blog.  I really liked the book.  In my next book, I will be commonly referring readers to this book (hopefully to a 2008 version?  Especially since the spatial chapter will be immediately outdated by new 2008 functionality, and there is some new features in the temporal area) along with Kalen's engine/storage books and Itzik's T-SQL books.

"Definitely different...great different...but different

I have read (well, ok, read through or I would post more reviews) quite a few technical books about SQL Server.  Where many books follow a very rigid path through a subject, quite often in a very feature driven manner (Here is this command, and you can do this.  Next, this command) or process driven manner (First we do this, then we do this...). 

This book is very different from that.  The title includes the word "Expert" for good reason.  This is a book that doesn't assume you know nothing and start from scratch, nor does it try to teach you every knob and switch on all of the SQL commands.  It it more about going to the next level and becoming the expert at programming with SQL Server by covering several deep dive subjects that every person needs to make the transition from "Pro" to "Expert".

It has eleven chapters, each of them about a distinct facet of programming SQL Server, from the common stuff you need to do or use right (testing, errors, privilege, CLR, encryption, dynamic SQL and concurrency) to three chapters on really deep applied stuff (spatial data, temporal data, and graphs/trees).  Each chapter has some very deep information, and a lot of code that could make you dizzy if you try to ingest it too fast.  It is all explained nicely though, and if you take the time to understand the code you will be far better off for it.

I would not suggest this as a book for the casual "I would like to know a bit more about SQL" reader.  It is more for the reader who is already good and wants to become a solid professional/expert SQL programmer who know the right way to do things.  For that reader it should be on your required reading list."

If you have been following along with my other Devlink posts (and I know that hundred or even tens of you are,) you probably know a good deal of what I am going to say.  One word says it all.  Wow!  (of course, I am going to continue on as say more words too!)

I definitely expected some things, just from looking at the website.  Good speakers, meeting a few nice folks, having a few good chats, and learning a couple of new things.  But for the admission price*, I kind of expected problems galore, lots of Nashville locals, and militantly anti-stored procedure programmers (kidding on the last one...more or less).

What I found was very few issues, a lot of out-of-towners, and a lot of programmers that understood what the dba types meant when we wanted stored procs.  Obviously it is not going to be an easy transaction from one side of that argument, but I think the more we can dialogue on the subject, the closer we get to having the perfect situation (a way to map objects

Add to the an overall tremendously well run conference.  Everything seemed to run almost like clockwork (I heard of a cancellation of a session, but that was the only thing I heard about) and they gave us a tremendous value.  Feeding us lunch and even dinner, even a comedian and a fun game (though speakers weren't allowed to play...) 

Devlink will definitely be on my calendar next year, hopefully again as a speaker, but even if I don't get to speak, I will definitely be there as an attendee.  It was definitely worth giving up not only a day of work, and even a weekend day.  Hey, I missed the first three quarters of the Tennessee football game and I still enjoyed being there, and there isn't much of anywhere I would say that to.  Thanks to the staff of Devlink, and see you next year.

The one thing it does make me wonder is if this kind of event could have effects on conferences like PASS.  There were people from all over the country there, and many of the attendees were not local at all.  If you can get this kind of value from a low cost alternative, in a nice city like Nashville, why go to the big city and pay big city rates?  Do you think any of us cared that the bagels we got at this conference were bought retail versus the premium prices for food that you pay at a conference center?  Or the ice code Pepsi was purchased wholesale versus several times that at the big conference center?  Or did anyone care that we were in a college using their space that is used during the week as a school?

I didn't.  In fact it made no difference to me at all. 

*To be quite fair, as a speaker, I paid the same amount to come to this conference as I have to most conferences. I am referring to the menu prices that attendees pay.

First up (well, second after McDonalds) was Paul Nielson's talk on his Nordic Object Oriented interface to  SQL Server.  Not bad, in fact, really interesting. Not sure if I am completely sold on it, but it is a very compelling architecture that marries objects (with inheitance and polymorphism) with relational. 

Two nitpicks: first in his scripts he used a nonstandard date format.. He used MM/DD/YYYY. This could be ambiguous to users in other countries.  Use YYYYMMDD :) Lastly, he called a three character (probably case sensitive) value a tiny GUID...we all laughed and he told me not to blog about it...so I won't.

After that got some lunch (and almost ate sandwiches that had been left in the speaker room overnight, including potato salad...) but Brian Sherwin saved me.  I had been told the sandwiches were from yesterday.  No problem I thought, I eat stuff from the fridge for days.  He stopped me and said....No, they have been there on the table since last night.  Even I have my limits. 

Once lunch was over I went into my cavernous room and gave two presentations.  Probably 20 in attendance, which was about the number I had seen in other presentations.  One on normalization, one on performance tuning tools.  I was very happy with the results of my presentations.  If you were at the conference, please feel free to drop me a mail or a comment and let me know what you thought.   You can download the presentations and code from http://drsql.org/presentations.aspx.

Afterwards I limped back to my car (first time I have stood up for over an hour in 5 months, because of my hip injury and 3 hours was pretty tough in the end, well, mostly my feet.), and discovered I had water spots all over it from some sprinklers.  Grrr.  Oh well, that is going to be a pain to get fixed....  At least I got to hear the end of the UT game which we won, (Go big orange!) and got home to see LSU dropped by Kentucky. 

Tomorrow I will finish up with my thoughts about the conference and such, just like I did after PASS.   But let's just say this.  The drinks were only finally getting low as I was leaving.  They didn't run out though, so no complaining about that needed :)

For now it is back to work.  But I guess if you have to do some work on a Saturday night, at least I can watch the football (left: Auburn-Ark on the Media Center, middle Cal-OSU on the 5.6 inch LCD, and Colorado-Kansas St on the sling box.) 

 After some morning meetings, it was off to Lipscomb University for Devlink. It is decided low rent versus a PASS, or TechEd, but that is not really a bad thing. Things weren't as "nice" looking, but everything was there and available just as good as those other places, and while the sessions I went to were decided mor