Live@edu Partner Airlift and SQL PASS, Flat Tires, and Thanksgiving

December 6, 2008

As for me why no posts since Nov 11th – well, I have attended the Live@edu Partner Airlift in Redmond, SQL PASS, had a flat tire, and enjoyed Thanksgiving. In this post

I attended the Live@edu Partner Airlift in Redmond to see what’s new under the sun for schools and universities. Exchange Labs is now available on a widespread basis (see fellow MVP Almero Steyn’s blog posts on Live@edu and on Exchange Labs) ! Students and alumni can now have school domain based exchange hosted email accounts for life at no cost to their schools. While this program has offered hotmail accounts now you can have hosted exchange accounts. I had a great time at the Airlift, thanks to Michael Wegman, Richard Wakeman, Andy Hoag, Steve Winfield (not Dave Winfield, nor Steve Winwood) and Anna Kinney and everyone else for putting it on.

I was privileged enough to attend SQL PASS for the first time. This year was in Seattle. So that meant two straight weeks in the Puget Sound area. It was fun to return and visit, see old friends, see my old house (where we lived for 9 months), see some beautiful wet countryside, experience more of downtown Seattle, but I sure was glad to get back to the warmth of the Arizona Sun! I did sneak my wife up for the weekend in between events and we did some of the tourist events we didn’t have the chance to do while living there. We ate dinner at the space needle, took a cruise in the bay, saw some glass blowing, rode the monorail and visited pikes place fish market (the famous one featured in Fish! as well as the other two lesser known fish markets).

200811151323_00361  I took this photo on the cruise.

I greatly enjoyed SQL PASS, making and renewing acquaintances with many of the SQL Server MVP’s. Thanks for letting me hang out and participate in all of the SQL MVP stuff without feeling like too much of an outsider! Saw lots of great sessions. Unfortunately I had to exit early from Gail Shaw’s Dirty Dozen presentation on the twelve things not to do in your SQL code, but it seemed like it was going quite well.

After returning from Seattle we discovered that our 1 yr old Honda Odyssey had a flat. Out came the jack. Ouch went the back! But at least it prompted me to look at my other car and realize that I needed two new tires (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure)!

I would like to remember this Thanksgiving as relaxing, fun, filled with family and friends and this year I can ;)

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