POW time !!!

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and are getting ready for a Happy New Year. I was on vacation the week before Christmas. My brothers and nephews came to Idaho for a visit and a lot of Snowboarding. We've had pretty good snow the past couple of weeks. We had an "epic" day at Brundage Mountain just outside of McCall Idaho which is 2.5 hours North of Boise. It dropped over a foot one night and we were the first ones on the lift. It was great floating on the fresh POWder.

Heading to Grand Targee Ski/Board Resort in Eastern Idaho for New Years. A safe and Happy New Year to everyone.

Monty

Is it just me?

Sometimes I feel like I behave like a simple CBO. I'm about to go home, driving from Austin to Houston. So in my mind I'm already building an execution plan:
- don't have enough fuel to get home, so
- i'll stop in Brenham at the Shell gas station
- get fuel
- if busy, move my car to parking spot
- go to restroom
- go to McDonald's to get a milkshake
- ready to make the rest of the trip home without another stop

I do this a lot. I'm wondering, am I weird or is it just a by-product of being in this business too long (or both)? When I got married, in the beginning I would get a bit irritated when my wife and I would have to do some spontaneous shopping. For example, we would be on our way home, and my wife would say "we need some milk, let's get some at Heb". This would cause me to build the execution plan for getting milk:
- walk to back of store where milk is
- get milk (vitamin D added)
- get in line at check-out
- pay and go home
Simple, fast and effective. But regularly my wife would invalidate this carefully constructed plan: "We're here anyway, let's also get some veggies/meat/whatever". Yikes! Not good! You said we we're getting milk, not get groceries (a totally different plan)! Luckily, I've adapted to that. I now allow for the variation in the plan. When we go into a supermarket, I just get a shopping cart by default...

Happy New Year to everybody!

Security Badge

Hehehehe....

Mustang in Rochester

Some times companies do nice things for folks, like Hertz this week gave me a Mustang Convertible. However they seem to only do this when it's not convertible season. Like this month, December. I'm in Rochester New York with this rather nice car, too bad that I drive into the place I'm teaching at in the predawn hours and back to the hotel after sunset. It has been in the 50s during the day, but I wouldn't know it since I'm in the center of the building with no windows. Oh well, it's nice to have a car with a serious amount of pep in it. Pushing down on the slanted board sure makes this thing go!

Some Great News

We've had a lot of students ask when there would be a graphical interface for the Hotsos SQL Test Harness. Great news !!! Last week Dave Stone of the Hotsos development staff attended OPINT in Dallas. Rumor has it that Dave will be developing the new GUI for the Harness and that was a big reason for him attending the course. Most excellent !!! Here's Dave plotting (???) how he's going to accomplish this feat.

Rain Ice and SNOW in Dallas

I had a great teach of our Performance Diagnostics class this week in Dallas TX. All things went rather well until Thursday when I was flying home. Of all things it was SNOWING in TX while back in MI it was raining. I had a connection thru Memphis this time. I had about and hour and half lay over so should have been a piece of cake to make the flight....

The plane was late getting into Dallas, and then we had to de-ice, which apparently is not something they do often at DFW. That took quite a long time, mostly because they didn't seem to have many de-icing trucks. And just to make things interesting it was a CRJ aircraft so I had to plane side check my carry on bag. All this added up getting to MEM with about 20 minutes. And you know it, the gates were on near opposite sides of the airport!

I walked on the plane behind the gate agent who was bringing down the flight manifest, that's really much to close!

Terrorist Targets (not) and Tasty Kakes!

I've been conducting Optimizing Oracle SQL Intensive this week in King of Prussia, PA. Most students are from PJM (which manages a huge power grid here on the east coast). Other students are from SIG, Dorman Products and Vertex Inc. I'd ask the students from PJM if they would like to host the Performance Diagnositcs course on-site but just yesterday they were identified as the number 2 terrorist target here on the East Coast. Re-thinking that request.

But I made a great discovery week .... Tasty Kakes !!! Individual deserts kinda' like Lil' Debbie's. Made locally here in the Philly area very "tasty" no pun intented.