I had a fantastic time at SQL in the City in London, and it was quite an honor for me to speak there, at the Royal Society of Medicine. Tomorrow I’m taking off for LA, for SQL in the City – LA, the second part of our experiment. This time I’m joined by Kalen Delaney, Denny Cherry, Aaron Nelson, and Rob Sullivan in addition to Grant, Brad, and a number of Red Gate’ers.
We’ll be at the Skirball Cultural Center, which is just off the 405 in LA. If you’re in the area, the map is below, and you can still register if you can come on Friday.
The last time we did this, we had a great mix of sessions, having panels of breaks taking place in one room when someone was speaking in another. There was plenty of refreshments, including a closing thank you with Red Gate beer.
This should be another fun event, and I’m hoping that it goes over well. If you enjoy it, please let Red Gate know so we can schedule more of these next year.
The DBA in Space competition continues today with the third question. This time I get to ask it, a sci-fi film question. No hints, but do a little research and don’t make a mistake. You only get one chance at each question to get through them. New questions are coming every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so keep an eye out for the new ones.
I had fun filming it, and I’ve got a few outtakes below from my efforts. It was surprisingly hard for me to remember two or three lines in between all the other things I normally do and the podcasts I record.
If you were in the Exhibition Hall yesterday at the PASS Summit, you were witness to an amazing announcement about a new contest. Red Gate Software is sending a DBA into space, giving you the chance to actually take a trip into space. Someone will get to experience weightlessness and see the planet as only astronauts have before. It’s a view that they always say has changed their lives. How absolutely, freaking, amazing is that?
As a kid I loved science fiction, dreaming of the chance to have a flying car, or serve on some spaceship like the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon. As I grew up, it seemed that most people were enamored with the idea of technology advancing to the point where we would fly in space, or more easily travel around the world. It still seems that we’re missing the Jetson’s cars that I expected would be around by 2011. Not only haven’t we duplicated the feats of 2001: A Space Odyssey by sending a ship to Jupiter, we haven’t even sent a manned mission to Mars. Forty years after landing a man on the moon, it seems that space travel has barely advanced.
However it has advanced, at least to the point where an ordinary human, albeit one with a deep wallet, can book a trip on a ship to travel into space. Red Gate has eliminated the wallet restriction, and all of you have a chance over the next five weeks to enter this contest and have a chance to experience weightlessness.
I hope you have fun with it and enjoy the quiz that goes along with the DBA in Space short webisodes that we’ve put together. The questions aren’t too hard, but they might require a little research on yur part. Take your time, however, as you only get one shot to answer them.
They shows are a little corny, but it was done to bring a smile to your face, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.
A great read. My wife and I considered this at one point.
At one point when I was in college, I spent a few weeks touring around Europe. I had a bicycle with me, a backpack with a couple changes of clothes, and wandered throughout parts of France, Spain, and Italy, staying in hostels and living a carefree life. However my few weeks were nothing compared to what many students in Australia often do. I met a few dozen students at different times from down under that were on a walkabout from school, traveling around the world for a year, experiencing life on their own terms, far away from home.
I was somewhat jealous, and I even considered joining them for an extended vacation of my own. I never did, but I’ve always wondered if I should have. My wife and I read One Year Off about seven or eight years ago and debated taking a walkabout the world with our kids, but decided against it. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not sure it’s the way I would want to live my life, but I admire those that can live like that. Personally, I’m not evens sure what I would do on a sabbatical, something that my company, Red Gate Software, has provided to a few of my co-workers.
James Moore of Red Gate, is combining the idea of a sabbatical away from work with a walkabout in another country. As James looks forward to the future of software tools, he’s decided that reading feature/bug requests and doing customer surveys isn’t enough. James is actually touring the US, meeting with customers, watching their developers in action and trying to learn how database development is evolving in a rapidly changing modern world with cloud services, new version of SQL Server and ever increasingly complex applications.
I don’t know how this walkabout will turn out, but I think it’s great that my company is actively trying to make sure that they solve the right problems, in the right way, for their customers. I think Red Gate has done a great job in building simple, intuitive, but incredibly useful tools over the last decade and I’m looking forward to seeing what James comes up with after this trip.
