Archives for October 2010

Plays Well With Others – Upsizing Your Skills With OCW

In our last installment , I describe the three essential skills I felt were hallmarks of the best and most successful directors that I’ve worked with.  Good directors, indeed good strategic leaders of all stripes, usually have at least one or more of these skills: strategic planning, visionary goals, and emotional intelligence. The good news about these skills, and lots of other skills that can advance your career, is that you can learn them.  Many people will spend a fortune on a classroom approach to learning these sorts of skills via an MBA.  If you’re a penny pincher, you can get a leg … [Read more...]

Unpopular Science – a REALLY cute art page

Thanks to Dan for sharing this with me!  It's really cute and I encourage you to take a look at it.  Read it here: http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/unpopular-science/.  For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. … [Read more...]

Michael Pollan on Why Modern American Food is Killing Us

I've been a follower of Michael Pollan ever since his book called the Botany of Desire. I was even more amazed by his next book, The Omnivore's Delimma. Now, he's got a new and very small book called Food Rules, which in a way is a completely different way to fix America's health and obesity crisis. One of his quotes struck me as especially prescient "I think we need to recognize that cheap food has a very high cost, in terms of health and the environment. That cost is getting paid by other people, by the public health system. That's part of the problem and the disconnect. I think that's … [Read more...]

30 Bloggers to Watch?

I found this blog post by Jade Craven to be interesting and insightful.  I also thought a few of her choices were a bit surprising, but still valuable.  Who'd have thought that Dave Navarro would be a good blogger to follow?Also, you can now follow all these guys from the one twitter list! Check out Blogger To Watch to easily follow all the people in this post.I'm curious what you think?-Kev … [Read more...]

Beautiful Girls!

Look at this two pretty girls. They don't get much more pretty than that, do they? Ava (on the left) do anything to get into a bathing suit. Any excuse will do, even in cold weather. And just in case you're wondering... The girls really love dress up and high heels. So, while they're sometimes a pill to get out the door to church on a sunny Sunday morning, they usually don't mind putting on a nice dress and shoes. Rachel did a nice little SmileBox photo album on the dress-up morning from the photo above on the right here. And yes, Katie (on the right) has a band-aid on her nose.This … [Read more...]

Videos: Strategies for Addressing Common SQL Server Challenges

As a busy SQL Server DBA you face an increasing number of daily challenges: Managing fast growing data volumes and database environments Diagnosing and resolving performance issues Effective backup and recovery Monitoring and tracking database changes Balancing current resources against future capacity needs Inefficiencies in any of these areas can lead to performance degradation, unauthorized database changes, and unplanned, extended downtime. Webcast originally presented by renowned SQL Server expert Kevin Kline and learn valuable strategies for addressing these challenges … [Read more...]

Quest Software announces Cassandra support in Toad for Cloud Databases and a partnership with Riptano.

My employer, Quest Software, Inc.  (QSFT 26.15, +0.68, +2.65%) today added Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad(R) for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any Open Database Connectivity-enabled relational database. Read the entire article here. … [Read more...]

DBTA: Getting Up to Speed on the SQL Server Social Media Scene

If you haven't paid attention to the new social media, you're doing yourself a disservice.  Just as email was a game-changer in the 1980s and the internet revolutionized society in the 1990s, social media is making a huge impact on the way people work and interact today.  Personally, I was skeptical about social networking until some good friends persuaded me to give it a trial run.  It seemed like a great way to dither away some valuable time, but I didn't see the business value in the whole proposition until I tried it. [READ MORE] … [Read more...]

Plays Well With Others – Successful Directors versus Successful Technologists

The skills that enable a person to be a top-tier database professional have very little to do with being a successful member of a board of directors. So what skills are needed for a person to be successful on a board of directors for any large organization?  Here are a handful of skills, in no particular order, that I’ve seen demonstrated by very successful directors from days past: Strategic thinking Let’s face it - technology is detail-oriented work.  No database professional can be truly effective at their job if they never get the parameters correct when calling a function, can’t … [Read more...]

I suspect that rising pressure at both work and at home can be relieved by drilling massive holes in my skull. Where's my auger? … [Read more...]

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