Wednesday, January 17, 2007

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire?

It has been cold in Austin the last couple of days. The result of two days of freezing rain: a thick layer of ice on my roof! OK, not a strange sight in some parts of the country, but here in Texas...

I sure don't need no water :-)

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Hotsos Support Discussion Forum

We've recently consolidated our class forums into our main support facility. You can now find the new Hotsos Discussion Forum here.

At the Discussion Forum, you can discuss Hotsos products, services, events, and techniques. Feel free to ask new questions or post your own responses to questions or post responses from other posters.

Drop by and join in!

Saturday, December 30, 2006

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


Friday, December 29, 2006

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!

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Thursday, December 14, 2006

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!

Monday, December 11, 2006

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.