Now normally my “crazy busy” comes from something SQL or work related but this month is just personal crazy (so this is one of those not so geeky posts so who knows maybe even my wife will read it )

MOVEMBER

As mentioned previously I’m taking part in this years Movember Fundraising Event.  That’s right I”m growing a wicked handlebar moustache and accepting donations to raise money for prostate cancer.

If you’d like to show your support for me and this great cause please go here: http://ca.movember.com/mospace/1477212 to make a donation.

(a “real” picture update is coming this week now that I’ve had some time to grow/shape this bad boy up)

MOVING DAY

Benchmark IT Consulting (and my family) have just this past weekend moved into our new house.

The new office setup (still a work in progress)

Everything went off without a hitch except for a minor major TV dropping issue…. it was my fault entirely and let me tell ya there was some sailor style yelling going on when I did it… but I guess on a positive note we’re now enjoying a new 46″ Samsung Smart TV so I guess things could be worse.

Vacation

For the second year in a row a family member has decided to cheat and take the easy way out and have a destination wedding So come mid November we’ll be packing up and heading off to Punta Cana.  It’s funny cause last year I was unable to attend the PASS Summit because of my sister in law getting married in Punta Cana so we’re basically lather, rinse, and repeating last years vacation this year.  3 resorts down and a week later.

Taekwondo Awards

If you’re friends with me on Facebook you’ll know how proud of a father I am.  On the evening of our house moving my son received the “Student of the Year” award from Sung Lee Taekwondo.  We knew in adavance that he was receiving the award and it is such a high honor that we didn’t want him to miss the awards ceremony on account of our buying a new house.

Here he is receiving the award from Master Lee.

So  yeah… needless to say life is pretty busy these days but I guess if I’m going to somehow try and turn this blog post into something somewhat professional I guess I’ll close with this:

Work/Life Balance… it’s SO important to have it because no matter how much you love and spend time on your career at the end of the day if you’re not happy with yourself and have time to enjoy your family then what the heck is the point?

I enjoy what I do and I’m one of the lucky ones that don’t dread Monday mornings (or mornings in general for that matter), I love being a part of an contributing to the SQL community, but nothing is quite as special to me as sitting in the hockey arena stands with my wifey and watching our kids skating their hearts out and enjoying life.

Happy Monday everyone!

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

Here is the session abstract: Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale of Victory Over Chaos

Once upon a time, you inherited an application or a database that was filled with chaos and inconsistencies. The T-SQL code is overly complex and impossible to ken. The architecture is painful to behold, and grueling to code for. One might optimistically say that query performance is “spectacularly mediocre”. If you’re without good documentation or system architects to guide you, how do you break the curse of confusion? In this session you’ll learn several methods for conquering chaotic code, and how to seek and destroy some of the nastier coding mistakes and inefficiencies. We will break complicated queries into key pieces, turn them upside-down, and reform them into something sensible. We will vanquish major issues like data abuse and index negligence. We will restructure joins, tame subqueries, and refactor dynamic SQL. We will emerge victorious!

If you were unable to attend the Live Meeting session here is a recording of the presentation.

Big thanks to Jen for doing this for us and if you are a SQL Server presenter and have interest in doing a Live Meeting session for EDMPASS please feel free to contact me.

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

I’m now happy to formally announce that I’m the new Senior DBA for Invidi.

This is an exciting opportunity for me to work with a fairly young company that has grown exponentially over the last decade to be a leader in targeted television advertising and promotion.  Invidi’s technology allows television service providers to simultaneously deliver multiple and distinct commercial streams to different households or set-top boxes during a single commercial break.

What that means is that 2 people watching the exact same program at the exact same time will have a different commercial stream that is suited to them.  Through the use of “Audience Classifiers” that take into account what they’re watching, gender, age, income, and geo-location and continual analysis of viewer behavior and click streams you will see a custom set of commercial that are focused to you and your interests. 

Pretty cool stuff

Thanks to everyone for their kind words in support of my announcement.  If you’ve reached out to me via this blog, email, facebook, or twitter I appreciate all the thoughts and comments.

Have a great day

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

Time for some good karma points #SQLPASS (and everyone else who stumbles onto this blog)…

CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR ME

The Easter Seals is a great cause and charity that works very hard to make a difference for people with special needs and their families by providing direct services, programs, advocacy, and public education.

I’m going to be rapelling down the side of a building in a super-hero costume and I’m looking to you fine folks to sponsor me to show your support for this amazing charity.

The TOP 3 CONTRIBUTORS (if they desire) will have either their picture or company logo on the back of my “super cape”.

CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR ME

CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR ME

Thanks for your support!!

UPDATE: Here is the link to my good friend Shaun’s sponsor page (if you want to  feel REALLY REALLY good ) Shaun’s Sponsor Page

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk and @Tier1OnSQL)

My lovely wife Heather gave me a call and said… “Guess what I have in my hands?”  I had heard that Ken and Jorge received their author copies this week so I was very quick to guess it right

Can’t wait to get home today and check it out… I have all the pdf page proofs for all the chapters but it just isn’t the same LOL

By request I’ll be doing a blog in the next day or so about the whole book writing experience as it was probably one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences in my career.

(Big thanks to wifey for taking a pic!!)

Enjoy!!

Not much.

But the one thing that we do have in common is we’re in our 30s and developed a perforated diverticulitis (which is rare for someone who is still considered “young” LOL).  I’ve never been one to hide things or keep things too private about myself.  I find blogging to be quite theraputic and if you’re looking for some Powershell or TSQL in this post I recommend not reading any further because this is going to be a non-geek post (as my sister has called my usual blog topics hehehe).

So a little background info…

Diverticulitis has 3 general states:

1. Perforation that is blocked or sealed off by the body
2. Perforation that forms an abscess
3. Perforation that does not seal off and leaks continuously into the abdomen

From the sounds of all the medical mumbojumbo I’ve heard over the last few days it sounds like my attack is the first one and lucky for me antibiotics seem to be doing the trick as I’m feeling much better.  If the antibiotics were not effective then the next option would of been to have surgery to remove the piece of colon that is causing the issue and then reconnecting the ends.  Next stop for me (a couple months down the road) is to have a camera in a very awkward place just to make sure that everything is A-OK.  Very rarely patients with diverticulitis will actually have another issue like colon cancer but they like to do a clean sweep just to make sure that if there is anything that needs attention that it gets it sooner rather then later.

Too much info yet? LOL well too bad… it’s my blog and I warned you that there will be no SQL Server chat in this post hahaha.

So this is something that may not bother me ever again, or it may come back and need to be treated with more antibiotics.  If it gets to the point where it’s coming back often then I can elect to have the surgery to remove the troublesome piece of colon.  From what I’ve read there is a < 15% chance that after removing the piece of colon with the issues that this may happen again.  I’m leaning towards having the surgery done if this happens again in the next few years because it sounds like the more attacks that you have the greater the chance of permanent damage being done.

I can make small changes to minimize the chances of another attack like adding more fibre into my diet but in general this is just one of those things that just happens.

So there ya go… that’s what has been going on in my world over the past week LOL

Many thanks to everyone for their kind words and well wishes.  It’s greatly appreciated and I promise that all (well most) future blog posts will be back to a SQL Server based topic LOL

Enjoy!!

Sorry Team USA… no “Miracle on Ice” this time. LOL

Hockey was not the only thing that interested me this Olympics though… it’s amazing how you can get into so many sports that you normally would not watch at all just because the participants are representing your country.  I saw curling, speed skating, moguls, ski jumping, downhill skiing, bobsledding, snowboarding and yes even figure skating LOL. 

I hated Canada’s “Own the Podium” campaign… it felt very “un-Canadian” to me and put a dark cloud (in my opinion) on the unprecedented success that Canada had at this years Winter Olympics.  It is obviously every countries wish to do well at the Olympics and whether the campaign was put in place to help raise money for our Olympic athletes or just raise general awareness for Canadians about the Olympics… if you took a poll of everyday average Canadians I think they would say it was in bad taste and didn’t represent Canada in a very favorable light.

That being said…. Thanks to all who represented our country and a special “shout out” to the Men’s and Women’s Hockey Teams!!!

Colin’s 2010 Themeword is……… FOCUS

No not that kind of focus….

More like this kind of focus:

In the past year I feel like I took on ALOT of new challenges:

• Started the Edmonton PASS Chapter ( EDMPASS.com )
• Served on the Abstract Selection Committee for the PASS Summit
• Started seriously blogging here at BenchmarkITConsulting.com
• Started another service offering business called SQL Wingmen ( SQLWingmen.com )
• Accepted an offer to co-author a book on Policy Based Management ( Apress.com )

all the while having a full time job and doing my best to balance work time with quality time with my family who give me nothing but support and smiles

2010 for me is going to be about focussing on everything new that I took on in 2009 and moving all of those initiatives forward.  Now that doesn’t really sound like SMART objectives so let me try and clarify.

EDMPASS

• I want to have all the EDMPASS meetings recorded via LiveMeeting and made available to everyone.
• I want an average of 40 physical attendees per meeting by this time next year
• I want to speak at 3 EDMPASS meetings before the next Summit

Abstract Selection Committee for the PASS Summit

• This one is a bit tricky as I’ve said before that if I wanted to speak at the Summit that I wouldn’t feel right being on the committee so I’ll leave this one as “undecided” for now

BenchmarkITConsulting.com

• My current unique visitors per month is anywhere from 6500 – 8000.  I’d like to maintain a constant 8000+ unique visitors a month
• I’ll continue to blog frequently (at least twice a week) and add more new content to help increase my traffic.

SQL Wingmen

• I want to increase my customer volume by at least 200% by this time next year

Policy Based Management Book

• I want to finish this book and learn everything I can from the process
• I will try to not make the editors go “comment crazy” with their nasty red font color

So there you have it… nothing really new because I think if I added anything new (from a professional point of view) to this already pretty full plate I think my lovely wife would shoot me, that and adding new things at this point would take away from the positive direction and momentum that these tasks currently have.

Happy New Year Everyone!!

Tag Time… I’m tagging the first 3 people who tweeted something….

• @SQLChicken – Jorge Segarra
• @AndyLeonard – Andy Leonard
• @SQLFool – Michelle Ufford

Enjoy!!

Meanwhile my “son learned to walk while I was away” (LOL Insert Cats In the Cradle song here)  I guess the biggest reason why I decided to bite off SO MUCH was that I was worried about what would happen if my contract didn’t get renewed or got cancelled, etc.  We made the decision that my wife wouldn’t go back to work and would concentrate on being a full-time mom so obviously if I didn’t have a “new contract” to go to that things would be difficult.

My wife (who has always been so supportive) kept reinforcing that I should stop worrying and just believe in myself.  Fast forward a couple years and I can honestly say that I am in a much more “balanced” state.  I’ve stopped worrying about my “next gig” so much as there always seem to be a couple choices/options available.  I still have my blog and run EDMPASS but I like to think that I don’t let the extra curricular activities take away too much time from my family.  I still do some side gigs from time to time but that’s more to help out people or friends that I’ve known for a while rather then as a need.

I’m not really sure about the direction or the “message” of this post other then just to recommend that you take a look at your Work / Life Balance and assess where you are at.  There are obviously periods of time when you’re going to have to make sacrifices for the benefit of your family but when you’re in those times do your best to assess your situation and set some goals and timelines as to when you can take your life back from your work and return it to you and your family.

My Family:

 4 years ago today!!

Our son Robbie and daughter Lana

Enjoy!!

~ Colin

I assume alot of this has to do with the fact that once you’ve reach a certain level of experience everyone should know the difference between a clustered and non-clustered index.  When interviewing for a “higher end” SQL Server DBA role I find that you get a few oober-techie type of questions but the interviewees are more looking for how the individual would handle different use cases.

I’ve recently been on the interviewer side of things and in reviewing my questions I did the same thing without really realizing it.  Back 5 or so years ago I remember usually having to go through 2 interviews… one a touchy feely personality type of interview and then the other a full on hour of tech questions that looked like they were taking straight off an MCITP exam or something.

Anyways… it was a great experience (as I’m one of those weird people who like interviews) and sounds like it would be a great project to be a part of.

Enjoy!!