Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping 23 Dec 2020

Posted on December 23, 2020 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to practice gratitude. List the kind things others have done for you.

I’ve thanked people for their help, which is hard for me. I’ve learned to be gracious and accepting of help, but I don’t really like it. I try to do most things for myself in the world.

However, I was injured recently, and while I could get around, it was painful. My wife, daughter, and even the kids I coach noticed and helped me out in a few ways:

bringing me breakfast in bed
getting my computer for me from another room
carrying my backpack
going to retrieve my phone from another room
bringing equipment into the gym and taking it out.

I thanked everyone and managed to appreciate their efforts without feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t always been able to do that.

Posted in Blog | Tagged coping, life, syndicated | 1 Comment

Datetime3

Posted on December 22, 2020 by way0utwest

I was reading about how 2020 ruined time for an author at The Verge. I agree. I find that March feels like an eternity ago, but so much of the hours and days between then and now have blended into a blur from that I can’t easily discern individual elements. As I cleaned up my speaking CV for 2020, I find myself either unable to differentiate some events from others or feeling that others were years ago.

Time perception is a funny thing, and as the article notes, we can perceive it in different ways, especially under stress or difficulties. I’ve seen some funny posts, like Pandemic Standard Time, the 211th of March, etc. In fact, this is day 286 of March for me. Mar 11 was the day that most things in my life shut down, though I could see that coming.

It’s gotten to be so crazy that I want to define a new data type, datetime3, which starts on that date and when I perform a datediff(day, 0, getdate()), I just get the number of days since my personal pandemic started. Maybe this could be a somber Easter Egg in SQL Server, a setting, like two digit year cutoff, that we each can set to remind us of the date when the world changed for us, and a new one began.

I do think that with medical technology leaping forward that we can find some semblance of our old world, where we get together and share knowledge, smiles, and laughs. However, I also think all of us, and our organizations, will be somewhat changed by the events of 2020.

I hope that begins in 2021.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

Posted in Editorial | Tagged Humor | Comments Off