Before you read too far, this is going to be a deeply personal post.Where do I begin? As many of you know I’ve been working on a UWP app to help query tuning in SQL Server and showed quite a few people an alpha of the tool at PASS Summit. My plans were to have the tool completed and published to the Windows Store by Christmas.
Category: Off Topic
Offtopic: Lifehack: Old tech has many purposes
For those that don’t know, I live in Texas. Been here all my life. There are two main things north Texans worry about from mother nature: Tornados & Hail.
Off Topic: Dream Car Garage: 6 Cars, $250k
I was reading Brent’s blog today and decided to make my own $250k dream car garage list. Mostly because I think about this topic a lot and probably spend way too much time researching cars I’ll never own. But you never know!
If Clippy found his way to SSMS
Recently my wife and I were comparing Cortana with Siri. It’s sometimes fun to compare virtual assistants to see how well they fare. Try asking Siri: “What time is it in GMT?”. We found a lot of others that Cortana knows that Siri doesn’t. This got me thinking. What if Clippy was included in SSMS?
Not SQL: Taking a stand against scammers
If you’ve read my blog you’ll probably know that I don’t like our lack of forward thinking when it comes to phones. Spoofing is something that should not exist and if we all took a stand to make changes to phone technology then it simply couldn’t exist.
I once got a call from “Microsoft Tech Support” stating that my machine was infected and he wanted to access it to help me clean up the problem.
Way Off-topic: Why cutting the cord was right for me
FYI: This one is way off topic so don’t expect to find any fancy SQL tips here.
I did it. I cut the cord on cable TV. I never saw this coming but a few weeks ago I decided it was time.
Off topic: The two cycle engine and your career path
I’ve been in technology for twenty years now. I’ve seen hundreds of environments, nearly 300 while employed at Microsoft alone.
One thing that I’ll always remember is my first day at Microsoft and not because I found out that health care was 100% free; though, that was a pleasant shocker. During New Employee Orientation (NEO), the trainer asked who had spouses that worked here and also who had worked here before.
Nintendo NES Classic Edition giveaway! #SQLFamily
I’ve managed to get my hands on a Nintendo NES Classic and I’m going to give it away. The details are as follows:
An observation about Unicode in SQL Server Management Studio
A week or so ago I read a blog post and tweet about using an emoji in SQL Server. This inspired me to use the ninja cat emoji for my demo database name and something interesting was discovered.
Off-Topic: Phone number spoofing. Why is this still a thing?
A bit of history
Long ago there were such things called diverters. The phone company used them so employees could dial a number and get a second dial tone; this way when dialing long distance the charges would be billed back to the company and not the employee.
I recall my friend using them to dial in to a BBS in the early 90’s. The BBS was in FT Worth, which was long distance for us on the other side of Dallas. He had a program that would dial a block of phone numbers all night long and give a report of which numbers gave a second dial tone. Could you imagine a phone call at 3:00 AM waking you? This was before Caller ID so no one could call him back or ever know who called.
If I recall correctly, I believe Hollywood had a few “Hacker” movies where the actor used diverters to mask their number.
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