Category: Uncategorized

I haven’t done a car update in some time, and I’d like to get back to them. Surprisingly quite a few of them provoke some amazing reactions from people. Especially when I talk about my Prius.

I don’t think the Prius is for everyone, but it is a great car in a certain band of usage. I’d like to say narrow band, but I’m not so sure. It works well for my family and I think it was a fantastic investment for us. This week I took my son snowboarding one day for his birthday and we drove 100 miles to the resort, with an elevation change of probably 3,000 ft or so. We filled up the tank before we left, and reset the counters for mileage. We got back with quite a bit of gas left, and a 48mpg average. That’s pretty good in the mountains, and while I’d like to be above 50mpg, I can’t complain. Not many cars would get 48, and our pickup truck would probably be averaging 12mpg.

It seems that lots of other people like the Prius as well and Toyota is predicting it will be the top selling car in a decade. I could see that coming true as more and more people replace their cars and look to get more fuel efficient. Not because they want to be green, but because they want to save money and fuel costs are one way to do that. I do think that Toyota would need to offer other models of the Prius, perhaps even an SUV or wagon, as speculated. I think they’d even do well to have a Scion or Lexus that is “powered by Prius” to capitalize on the name and badging.

A friend asked me earlier this year if I thought a Prius was a good idea. We talked over his usage and driving and came to the conclusion it wasn’t a good move for him. I’ll probably republish that as part of an editorial here soon with the holidays in December.

I don’t know why so many people dislike the Prius. It’s a good car, and good technology, and if it fits you, then it’s worth using. If not, then find the car that better fits your life.

I’ve always thought that you should invest where you can. Make a little effort now that will pay back later, in life and in your job.

I read a blog recently from Mike Walsh that talks about making that investment. If you do something that can save time later, that can be of great benefit in your job. I’ve heard this same argument for people when developing software. If you take more time to architect and test, you’ll save time later on.

I agree with that, but it’s not always that simple. Should you automate a report that your boss wants once a week? If you take 5 minutes in Excel to build it from a query and you think it would require about 4 hours to build the report, set up the email automation, test it, etc, is it worth doing? That’s a years worth of time to do the report at once as opposed to your 5 minutes a day. Plus there’s the chance that things will fail and you’ll lose a couple more hours during the year maintaining it. Not such a simple choice now.

In that example, I’d probably continue to do it manually until it became a pain point. 5 minutes a week is annoying at times, but my boss might change things, he might get tired of it, or he might require it to happen when I’m on vacation. In those cases I think it would then make sense to build a report.

If I do things repeatedly, it does make some sense to automate them, or make an investment that saves me time later. However you can’t invest in everything and you have to make choices. That means taking a few minutes to think about how big an investment this is, to what degree does it help, and how important is it to making your job easier. If it seems worthwhile, do it. If not, deal with it as it comes up.

Eventually you start to build a level of experience that helps you judge what’s worth investing in and what’s not. You’ll never get that 100% right, but don’t be afraid to let some things go and deal with them as one-offs, even regularly, if the investment doesn’t make sense to you.

One of the things that I thought about doing after the 2008 PASS Summit was to bring someone along with me as a photographer/videographer that would take lots of pictures and video of the event. I thought about bringing my wife, but that didn’t work out and I dropped the ball on that task.

And I regret it.

Coming back, going through some of the images and video I did get made me realize how much I missed. I rarely stopped to take video, I’d forgotten my tripod support, I got distracted, and ended up not getting much in the way of media from the event.

Pat Wright walked around with his camera and got a lot of great shots, but he wasn’t always near me, and I realized that I missed a lot of shots.

So another goal for 2010. I need to carry a video camera and real camera (DSLR or other fast response camera) to events and make sure that I get some footage. I want to get some responses and impressions from people, more shots of the setup, the signs, and people milling around.

And some “manamana” quotes from people as well. I’d like a little Muppet video to come out of 2010.

I used to really try not to over-license in the small companies I worked at. It seems I’d spend a few days every quarter or two counting up usage, asking people what they did, looking at logs, and eventually calculating our needs. Then compare the needs to what we’d purchased and I’d price out software. Typically I came to this conclusion.

License everyone.

It didn’t make sense to try and manage Office applications or SQL Server CALs. It was work, and it distracted me from other things I could be doing to make the company more productive. If we were over-licensed by a few hundred dollars a person, it was a waste of my time. And what I found was that we were rarely overlicensed, and as soon as I didn’t give someone Powerpoint or a SQL Server CAL, they’d request it.

I know that licensing is expensive, and not everyone needs all software, but there is a core set of software, and this likely includes SQL Server CALs, that should just be purchased for everyone and then ignored. It’s too hard to do anything else, and it’s likely a waste of time.

I do think that you ought to try and combine SQL Servers where possible, and share the instance with multiple databases, but I don’t think that it’s the same with clients. Get ‘em and forget ‘em.