Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 19 Oct 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to share your most important goals with the people you trust.

    There are not a lot of people that I really trust and want to share some goals with. It’s a few, and really, this is a time when I’m re-evaluating my life and goals. I have a son out of college, another in his last year, and a daughter in college. I can see the end of financial responsibility outside of my wife and I.

    Therefore, I am starting to look at life, goals, and plans in a new way. I get on a plane tomorrow with my wife, taking a vacation to visit some family. While we’re traveling, I’m looking forward to some time with just my wife where we can talk about life, some plans, and start to think about what’s important to us in the next decade.

  • Daily Coping 16 Oct 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to thank yourself for achieving things you often take for granted.

    I think that I end up accomplishing a lot of things each week. I have a busy life, engage in lots, and often things go well. However, it’s easy to take, or expect, things to go well. It’s also easy to criticize yourself for the things that aren’t as perfect or as well done as you’d like.

    One of those things that I often do is try to take care of my body with regular exercise. I take it for granted that I’ll go to a few yoga classes, practice on my own, life weights, and more. I don’t miss a lot of days, as you can see from my August

    2020-10-12 10_39_34-MapMyRun

    and September logs

    2020-10-12 10_39_26-MapMyRun

    I’m taking a moment to thank myself for actually getting some thing done here.

  • Daily Coping 15 Oct 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to look out for positive news and reasons to be cheerful today.

    I actually tend to look for positive news in social media, but only in a couple places. The first is Instagram, where I post some pictures, primarily for my Mom and friends. I have a few accounts I follow, and I like to see what other people post, what captures their imagination, and often, what makes them smile.

    Often, that’s a lift for me because most people share the exciting and happy moments.

    The other place is LinkedIn, where I tend to see less complaining, but more people showcasing what they’ve done well in their careers. I can like, comment, and praise them for their efforts.

    There is good news elsewhere, but often buried in lots of no-good news.

  • Writing Output from Powershell

    One of the things we often want to do when building a PoSh script is to get some output. I first learned about Write-Host, but I learned over time that this isn’t the best way to do this. Most of the early scripts I saw used this, so I was confused until I went through a few of this post: Write-Host Considered Harmful. This is from Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PoSh.

    In the post, he notes that most of the time we don’t want to use Write-Host, because this means we can’t use the output of a command in the pipeline. For debugging you might think that this doesn’t matter, but Write-Debug is better.

    He recommend Write-Output, which is something I want to start to use. That, or Write-Verbose, so the user can get more or less output as needed.

    Hopefully this will help me to better write PoSh code that others can easily use.