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I said I was going to do it last year, and I followed through. After submitting an application to volunteer, I was picked to help on the Spotlight/Pre/Post Con committee, so I’ll be helping to pick which sessions and topics are going to be available for those sessions.

I’m looking forward to it, though I think this will be pretty easy. The people that submit for the pre/post cons tend to be pretty well known speakers, and based on popularity, we’ll likely pick similar topics to last year.

However if there’s something you’d like to see, please let me know.

I saw this blog about an Accenture survey of potential car buyers. It mentions that people likely won’t buy a green car unless it is superior in every way to a gasoline only car. The blog tends to lean towards the side of someone that doesn’t like hybrids. There’s a comment about why they look so bizarre, which seems odd to me. There are a lot of hybrids out there that look just like the gasoline versions. The Prius is shaped differently, but so is the Dodge Caliber. Are they really odd?

Are these really that different? I might argue the Prius has softer lines, which contribute to better gas mileage.

I think that there is a lot of fear out there for people in looking at hybrids. I have a few friends that are down on them, based on comments from other friends, that don’t seem right. I think there is some mis-information out there, as well as just some prejudice for no reason.

I have had friends, and strangers, come ask me about my Prius experience and if I recommend them. I think it’s a great car, but I do caution them that they ought to do some analysis. I had one guy actually send me a bunch of data on his driving habits, and I crunched numbers with him, arriving at the decision that a Prius didn’t make sense for him.

In 3 years, I’ve driven 60,000 miles. That’s 20k a year, and I think that at the current $2.75 a gallon, I think it saves me about $1000-1100 a year in gas over even something like a Ford Focus, which is listed as the same class by the government as a Prius.  If I compare to a minivan, which was what we considered, I’m more like $1500 a year.

That’s significant, and it means that my $4500 “hybrid tax” has been paid off. It actually paid off sooner since my first year we drove 26k miles and gas was $4/gal!

However if you drive more like 10-12k miles, and consider a better vehicle that gets closer to 30mpg, then it might be savings of more like $500 a year. If you have a of highway driving, then you might be saving less, so it doesn’t make sense.

Unless you just want the car.

  One of the dangers of being an “Internet Journalist” or even just a blogger, is that you might compromise who you are to attract readers.
Or in the case of your “modern resume,” impress someone for a new job.
Here is case of someone losing control of their ethics, for the sake of ratings. This is more of a journalism story, and the only person that I think it really hurts is the writer, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe it didn’t even hurt him. He still has a job.
You, however, might not be so lucky.
There are companies that would let you go if they found out you misrepresented yourself in an interview, or with a resume.
Don’t write something for the sake of attracting or impressing readers. Write about what you know, and what you don’t. Admit your mistakes, and highlight your successes.
Your blog, your presentations, your articles, are all a part of your career, and you should treat them as though they are precious. You are the product in your career, you are what you can sell, and your brand is what you have to sell.
If people stop believing in that, you are in trouble.

I think maintenance plans were a great improvement in SQL Server 2005, with a more visual designer and the ability of the DBA to chain together whatever tasks they wanted.  Service Pack 2 brought some enhancements, and a few bugs, so I’d recommend that you apply SP3 to your servers and clients if you are using them.

I rarely see issues with building packages since it’s a fairly simple designer, but there are two places where I have seen people have trouble editing them.

1. Version differences
2. Outside editors

I’ll explain the basic issues I’ve seen to give you a few things to check if you can’t open a plan.

Version Differences – The designer for maintenance plans is a cut-down version of the SSIS editor. As a result, there are sometime changes or enhancements to this designer delivered in SPs or CUs. If you have created a package in one version of SSMS, often you cannot open that package in a lower version. So the first thing to check is that the server and/or designer client is at a higher version than the one that is failing.

Outside Editors – The designer is a version of the SSIS designer, which is a version of Visual Studio. However those products contain many more features, and while you can use them to edit your maintenance plans, you can introduce changes to the plan that the basic SSMS designer does not support. As a result, you can’t then open the package again in the SSMS designer if you’ve opened it in Visual Studio or BIDS and changed something.

There usually are error messages to clue you in to the issue, but these are the two things I’d check first if you have issues modifying maintenance plans in SSMS.