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I’m not sure what happened here. I walked up to my desktop, wiggled the mouse, and nothing happened. In the true definition of insanity, I then did it a few more times and achieved the same result. Hitting the keyboard didn’t help and it appeared frozen.

Weird, but no cause for concern immediately. I clicked the power button a couple times, which tends to shut things and and when that didn’t work, held it in for a power down. When the computer restarted, it came back up as though it had been in hibernate mode. I had a full desktop, which surprised me. However I was more concerned when it was operating very, very slow.

Everything seemed to take 30-40seconds or more, even opening a mail message. Since I have a quad core machine, x64, 8GB RAM, that’s unusual. Things usually fly around the screen. Then I happened to notice a reminder pop up from Outlook that said it was 2,000-some days overdue.

Huh? Like an episode of the twilight zone, I opened the time applet to see this:

I snapped a picture, changed the time back (which is interesting) and then rebooted. Things sped up and everything was back to normal, but I was a little concerned. How did my desktop move 29 years into the future? This picture still has the 2039 timestamp, so it’s always at the top of my picture list.

Very weird. Not something I’d expect in Windows 7, but I’ll keep an eye on it. This machine has been rock solid for over six months, so I’m not looking forward to any more surprises like this.

I saw Joe Webb’s post, and then Gethryn Ellis’ post as well on when SQL Server last restarted. It’s something that can be handy when troubleshooting and trying to figure out what’s going on with SQL Server.

I’ve also used it to track potential issues as well, like when others might be changing things on the server, like patching, altering configuration (memory) or something else.

So how do you do it? Here’s what I’ve done. I’ve used before. I use this function in SQL Server to read the error log in T-SQL.

exec xp_readerrorlog

That’s good since the first timestamp here is the time that SQL Server started. It’s before the databases are even accessible. Now I need to grab that one date. I’ve wrapped this in a small bit of code.

DECLARE  @logger TABLE
(
    dt datetime,
    Process varchar(50),
    txt varchar(MAX)
)
INSERT @logger exec xp_readerrorlog
SELECT TOP 1 dt FROM @logger

I can store this value in a table, which is what I usually do, and then I can watch it over time, set an alert on it in a daily report, whatever.

Not perhaps as elegant as some of the other solutions, but one that’s worked for me.

Been thinking a lot about leadership lately, especially the lack of it. Hearing stories from friends about what they deal with, reading, it’s kind of funny. This cartoon seemed to fit well.

“Show up for work on time for six months and then we’ll talk. Until then, I have four words for you: shut the fuck up.” – Kitchen Confidential

I wish people showed up and heard this on their first day of work. Too many people I think have a very high opinion of their work, they think they know more than they do, and they don’t do a good job of fitting in.

Perhaps six months is too long for developers or DBAs, but they could certainly do well with 30 days of listening and learning instead of talking.