Top 10 Things I Learned Last Week: Week of 4/11/2010
- Jason Strate (Web|Twitter) sings like the worst drunken office Santa ever William Shatner; dances like Seth Rogan after a debilitating and permanent head injury Dr. Stephen Hawking. Unfortunately Jes Borland (Web|Twitter) gets caught in the crossfire.
- Companies still continue to make money selling products developed on 32-bit Windows, running 32-bit SQL Server 2005. Some software development companies still have not realized that they can make the pretty picture box thingy talk to the other thingy where the data stuff gets put unless they sit on the same metal box with the cables running out of it. Some software companies think that they need to handle datbase clustering and replication type behaviors in their applications and not their databases. Every time I encounter one of these situations (five in the past 3 weeks) I ring-up the creepy meth-head that I saw on the local news a few months back who likes to take pictures of old women’s bare feet. I hire him to walk door-to-door in nursing homes punching companion dogs for the elderly while in full clown costume and grease paint. I pay him in sudafed and bleach. At twice as much it would still be a bargain.
- In Chicago you have road crews that open and close the same lane every 1.5 miles. There is no construction being performed, but it gives the the family members of the local politicians who were too smart to stay out of jail, but to dumb to commit white collar crime a way to make a living. It also gives the members of the Chicago Blackhawks something to do after the first round of the NHL Playoffs. (ZING!)
- SQL Server 2008 R2 is slated for release on 5/21/2010. The release of which will alter how licensing is handled for Enterprise Edition SQL – capping the number of instances per license to 4 from unlimited. Instead Data Center Edition can be licensed for unlimited instances per license (of course this is also per CPU.) The cost of the Data Center Edition license per CPU is rumoured to be one or more of the following (each still being slightly cheaper than Oracle.): One Russian toddler so cheap that rednecks are sending them back where they came from; ten pygmy goats, an alpaca, and an empty barn for five hours; mistresses: two of Tiger Woods’, three of Jessie James’; a first class ticket on the first British Airlines flight leaving New York bound for London.
- It’s completely possible to find bad pizza in Chicagoland. Just go to Elk Grove. You’ll also find the service is horrible, martinis are undrikable, margaritas are apparently made with Mountain Dew. They can even screw up a Guinness.
- If you attempt to get four or more SQL Professionals to have a serious meeting about a specific topic that you’ll occasionally keep to that topic, but most likely will end up discussing one or all of the following: this; this also; especially this; 70’s Christian Folk music possibly performed by a certain SQL Pro that bears a resemblance to Garth Brooks; dropping trou in order to make a statement; the Lolz Cat Bible (particularly John 3:16 and Ezekiel 25:17) ; and Dancing With The Stars just checking to see if you’re paying attention. I’d personally like to have some alone time with John and Kate minus the eight for twelve hours of vigorous taint-and-throat-punching followed by their biggest punishment: ignoring them for another twelve hours.
- Eight grown men sitting in a hotel lobby eating ice cream sandwiches is a little creepy from the outside looking in. It’s a lot creepy from the inside looking out.
- DBAs are made of wood. If you throw them into a hot tub, they decimal(0,38) float. Particularly when sipping wine from plastic cups living the fine lifestyle of the high-class DBAs. Therefore weighing as much as a duck and in effect guilty of witchcraft.
- There was a guy in the hotel bar that looked like Donald Farmer and sounded exactly like Bill Swerski, the character George Wendt played in the Ditka’s sketches on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s. For that matter the other 5 guys in his group sounded like that too. Thus I learned that some stereotypes are well deserved.
- I learned that I could successfully weave the phrases “champagne room”, “baby cave”, and “Lady Ga Ga” into a business conversation in discussing Sharepoint Mirroring and not have it seem awkward. Well, maybe a little awkward, but I’d like to see you try it.
- My eleven year old son taught me how to convert farenheit to celcius. 11 is metric for 10 so this totally makes the list. He also showed me that he could earn a higher SAT score at age 11 than half of my graduating class did back in 1986. Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention when he taught me the temperature conversion formula thing. I started thinking of this halfway through his instruction.