So as I said two days ago in this blog entry, I had 3 licenses to give away to people who were suggested by their friends as in need of an MSDN license, and I gave two away, so one left.

In both cases it was folks who were lacking in the tools to either get started, or get their jobs done with the tools that they had available.  As you can probably tell, I like to give things away :)

So, one more to go and I won't have wasted this cool opportunity that the MVP program gave us to share with people.

In many ways it is surprising to me the culture that has arisen in computer science type disciplines.  In very few vocations can I even imagine people sitting down for hours a day helping out others with their job.  Part of me thinks it could be partially due to the fact that we "own" the medium, but is that it?  There are discussion forums for everything from theology to pornography and everything in between. 

Plus, there are plenty of active groups for other topics like cars, entertainment, etc, but the difference seems to me that this is a vocation. Helping others out in a computer forum empowers someone to do their job.  Good for them, but seriously, what is in it for me...Why do it?  In some ways it is bad for me, because the tip I give to you might be the tidbit of knowledge that allows them to create the next killer app. 

Here is my top 5 list of reasons why I do it ordered from most important down to least.  Your list may vary.

It just feels good – It always feels good to help someone out in need.  Most people say thank you, and share that your advice was helpful.  Even giving advice about why someone could have done things better (and not just how to do what they want to do how they want to do it, even though you know it is not the right way to perform the task the way they want to) generally isn’t too bad an experience.  Usually people appreciate the help. 

It is usually a good mental exercise – While some questions are easy, most aren’t totally straightforward.  Some of the really good ones can be like an advanced degree in computer science, and really better, since the situations aren’t manufactured (to me the one major downfall to the education process is the lack of real world/unsolvable problems.)  I attribute 40% of my skills in SQL Server directly to learning I have acquired in newsgroups/forums.  The best part is that other people often have better solutions than you.  Other people's problems are great for this and since they aren't yours, if you can't solve it, you can just wait for someone else to teach you how it is done.

It helps you find out how much you know – A large amount of humility is required for sharing your knowledge publicly.  You will not always be right, no matter who you are.  I have corrected many many people who are way smarter than I.  So you post an answer, and sometimes it will be slightly, or even very wrong.  Someone will tell you and set you straight. If you learn from it, you will find your skills growing at a fast clip.  It may also turn out that you are almost always wrong.  That is fine too, as long as you grow with it.   Don’t be afraid to debate your case if you think you are right.  Luckily there are enough people out there to either agree or set you straight. 

Reciprocity – When I have a problem that I can’t solve, I go to the newsgroups.  I have just recently posted two or three times to the Analysis Services forums and received wonderful answers to my questions that got me going in the right direction.  Plus, a great chap from Microsoft helped me get Reporting Services up and running when I had hit the wall and was unable to go any further.  It is especially nice to not only be able to get help, but to give it.
 
Recognition/Notoriety - I have to be honest and say that this is a tiny part of what keeps me going.  It is not always easy to spend an hour or two a day on the computer making no actual progress in your own life/work, but being seen by my peers is really the motivator sometimes to actually pick up the computer.  Over the past two years when I have been quite active in the newsgroups and forums, I have to say that you can generally tell people who are only in it for notoriety.   Regardless of how good their answers or advice is, they generally don’t last. 

Regardless of what motivates you, please consider coming on over to the NNTP newsgroups (http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx) or the web based forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/), you just might learn something (and you just might teach me something.)

My father passed away 10 years ago at the age of 59.  It is pretty easy for me to remember when this occurred because it happened just before the Olympic games in Atlanta, GA, (it also happened the year I decided to stop getting my dad a present for Father's Day cause he really did have everything he wanted.) 

My dad worked as a top mechanic for a Ford dealership for ~12 years after leaving the Air Force. He could have been a mechanic or crew chief for a NASCAR driver if he wanted, but he wasn't that kind of guy.  He just did what he did and did it well.  After a tiff with the boss's son/manager, he quit his job and looked for a different type job. He was out of work for several months (including a Christmas where I got an electric shaver, every young man's dream :) and got a job as fleet manager for the Cherokee National Forest in Cleveland TN.  Soon he was tops at that job and was eventually instrumental in getting the Whitewater rafting event and Whitewater Center (http://www.fs.fed.us/r8/ocoee/) set up over on the Ocoee river, as he was one of the most organized/knowledgeable persons there. (There was a tree planted and a plaque there in his memory at the center after he died (presumably because he worked himself to death helping to build it :)  Actually he died of pneumonia, but he had really pushed himself insanely up until that point.)

He was a very tough man.  He never shied away from hard work, and his willpower (other than for food) was amazing.  He was one of the few people I knew who quit smoking in one day.  Say, "bah" and never looked back, not even telling my mom until she noticed that they were only purchasing her brand.  My mom smoked for 15 more years or so before quitting (thankfully, as their house really smelled worse than feet.)  When he got out of the service to be a dad and husband, he settled down almost immediately into a very comfortable way.  He was even the best cook in the family, and would constantly torment my mom with excellent food that had some ingredient that she didn't know (it was his only playful side.)

He was a tremendously well liked man, if you worked with him.

Why do I say, if you worked with him?  This isn't Springer (or even Oprah) so I have no sordid tale of major abuse, maltreatment, or anything like this.  But the fact is he was a pain in the butt as a father.  He was on my case to do this, do that, etc for all of my young life.  Saturdays, I liked to watch cartoons (ok I still do) but first chores had to be done, and done right.  And he checked.  Did I mention he was in the Army and the Air Force?  Perhaps I didn't.  Or that he was a perfectionist?  No, well, those criteria for a good coworker make for a pain in a boss (and he was a father like a boss,) especially when you are a slacker (yes, I am.)  He was never able to teach me anything as our personalities were just so different (and you don't want a large man mad with a big wrench in his hand.)

Another thing that made it harder for us to bond was that we could never play sports together.  We never threw a ball, or anything (awww.)  This wasn't his fault as he only could see from one eye at a time.  Throwing a baseball sans depth perception is NOT a good idea.  On the other hand, his depth perception never seemed to fail him when the need to use a belt or a switch on me (cut by my own hand, not too big, not too small :) when I deserved it and I did deserve it often enough (something I realize in now in retrospect.)  It didn't happen too much, but a few times were particularly memorable (except when I destroyed a neighbor of a different race's fence (a man who already felt out of place in the neighborhood. The rest of our punishment was to apologize and my accomplices and my parents paid to rebuild the fence. My dad was particularly enthusiastic that day and it was the only really big punishment I ever received. It is funny, the pain didn't last for days, but the feeling of shame for having pushed things that far did.  The worst part of a spanking was that I knew I had let him down.  No, it did not hurt him more than me, but frankly I was disappointing to him that day.

Needless to say, it was tough throughout my childhood trying to please him, but if this was just a whine session I probably wouldn't have written it.  Curiously, through all of the fights and contention, his amazing work ethic rubbed off on me.  I am a bit of a slob (if you know me, shut up) in life, but when it comes to databases, I tend to be fanatical.  I want to do it right so I spend almost all of my personal free time working on learning one more thing that I don't know.  This whole blog is about that insane desire to achieve a kind of greatness, though I have no desire to become a celebrity.  I just want to be right, as well as share my knowledge with you the reader.  Writing has become my learning outlet, in that it refines my skills because I have to be as close to perfect as possible so I can make him proud.  That was always something that I really wanted to do. Of course, he gave some praise, but never false praise.  If I was being dumb, he said dumb.  When he was proud, he said proud.

In the last 5 years of his life, something weird happened.  We became almost friends.  I always loved him and knew that he cared like crazy about me, but I started to grow to his level to where we could talk.  When I moved from Cleveland, TN to Virginia Beach, VA he drove the truck (it was a 12 hour drive.) We really clicked as two people who had been acquaintances for years might.  We had a weird game during these years where we compared salaries, and he was always kind of funny in how he was proud that he mad a bit more than me, in fact in his last year he just beat me with a bonus he got. 

Am I sad that he is gone.  Absolutely.  I know that he is in a better place, so it is mostly a sadness for me.  I need someone to ask questions about cars, or house things, stuff he was great at.  The bookshelf that sits in my den with all of our family books on it was made by him.  Like I said, I never learned a thing about such things from him.  And if I even consider learning some skill, I now feel required to learn everything about it. Luckily I am still a slacker in many ways and avoid most other skills other than computers (last night I was up to 5AM trying to learn SSIS!)  I miss my dad, and am very proud of who I am because of who he was, something that was not easy to say until now, I promise you.

Tomorrow I will post "Part Two, Being a Father" and then back to being the SQL guy, I promise :)

A tool I suggest you check out is SQL Prompt from RedGate.  You can download it here:  http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_prompt/index.htm.  It is a version of the old PromptSQL tool that was independently developed, with a happy ending for that fellow, no doubt :)  It is free until September of this year, when it will no longer be quite as free most likely. 

So the question is, will youi be completely hooked by then.  And that is a good question.  It is not perfect, and it often feels intrusive.  But it is quite good, and it has a lot of features that become indispensible when you get used to them.  Like capitalizing keywords.  I have left them in lowercase for years now, but when writing it does look better to have your keywords capitalized (especially when you don't have color to emphasize them, which you don't when you are in a black and white book, or when you are too lazy to colorize them for a webpage.

* Choosable lists of columns, parameters, tables, etc when you reach certain keywords (like FROM, SELECT, JOIN, etc) or apply a certain keystroke.
* Tooltips that show you the structure of tables when you type them
* Capitalization of words
* Snippet expansion (I have one called trycatch that expands to:

BEGIN TRY

END TRY
BEGIN CATCH

END CATCH  

)

It works with Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager, Management Studio VS.NET 2003 and 2005, plus a couple of others.  I have only tried it with SSMS. 

One of the interesting things it does is maintain metadata.  SQL Prompt has an icon in the notification area of the taskbar. When you go to a database the first time, it notices this and goes and fetches metadata.  A tooltip pops up each time you connect.

So go give it a try, see what you like, and send RedGate your comments.  They will listen..

What an annoying day (though for the softer of constitution out there, it all turned out adequately.)  I am out of town at my corporate site, 700 miles from home and it took me as long to fly as it would have to drive...at the speed limit.  

See the pictures below, my flight from Nashville to St Louis was delayed by it.  The repair guy made no less than 3 trips, once to diagnose the problem, once to tape it up (and write INOP Do Not Use on the duct tape), once more for the little sticker and the big sign.  Needless to say it was pretty annoying that I arrived in St Louis too late for my plane to Norfolk, VA, but I will never complain when they are too careful.  Fact is, the alternative is far less pretty. 

So the only flights are to go back through Dallas and arrive at 5, or stay in St Louis until 7:45.  I wish I had stayed in St Louis.  I got to DFW, went from the gate where the plane arrived in C concourse over to the A concourse.  Once I arrive there, there is a guy telling us that the plane is back at C.  Dandy.  So I ride back over, and grab this (what turned out to be a) wierd salad from Fridays.  Cranberries?  Sorry, stomach.  Pecan crusted chicken?  Why didn't I read the cover better?  Oh well, it was edible, if a bit froofy. 

So I fly in to Norfolk, and watch all of the bags pass by, no sight of my bags (of course, what else could it be?)  Then I hadn't called Budget to hold my car reservation, so I had to pay more for the Crown Boatoria I am driving this week (I drive a Ford Focus, which is a bit smaller!) since they were out of everything else.

But there is a happy ending (beyond the fact that the duct tap held and the plane didn't fall apart.)  I went to the clothing store to pick up some clothes (just in case) and they had a good sale on some really nice long sleeve shirts, which I would have purchased if I had seen them (and I would not have went shopping otherwise.)  At 10:30 (two hours ahead of time) they dropped off my luggage at my hotel desk.  Travel is always ad adventure and in this case I at least got some new clothes out of it (plus several hundred more frequent flyer miles :)

Coming soon, my blog year resolutions...