1. … And More (Sacrilege Remixes) by Can
2. Free (Billy Breathes) by Phish
3. Reckoner (In/Rainbows) by Radiohead
4. Drugs (The Name of this Band is Talking Heads) by The Talking Heads
5. Weissense by Neu!
6. Ultraviolence (Power, Corruption & Lies) by New Order
7. Aero Dynamik! (Minimum Maximum) by Kraftwerk

In the meantime I’m catching up on the whole social media world. I now have a twitter acount and a Facebook account.

When not at work, changing diapers or makeing BBJ sandwiches, I am boning up on model driven software design and functional programming languages such as f# and Haskell.

This week saw the arrival of a new member of our family. My wife and I are now the proud parents of a baby girl.

The Geek

A long time ago I was a hospital orderly at the old Traverse City Osteopathic Hospital, and the nurse midwife who delivered our baby was a nurse at the same hospital. During a calm moment after the delivery we started going to memory lane talking our late lamented “Osteo.” I started remembering how with some patients we documented I & O, or ins and outs. The “I” tracked food the patient ate. The “O” tracked, well, output (insert scatalogical joke here). This data was used by the nurses and physicians as a diagnostic metric for assessing the patient’s condition. Now more more than fifteen years later as a DBA, I document I/O, or Input and Output as a diagnostic metric for assessing the condition and performance of a SQL Server instance.

With the presidential campaign shifting to its final phase, I again started thinking again about politics and IT. I started my first job in IT ten years ago, and was working for an ISP during the 2000 hanging chad drama. Since I live in a predominately Republican area of Michigan, I am used to being a minority side of the political spectrum. But I was still surprised to see how conservative IT people are. Granted most can’t be bothered with politics, but still I find IT department’s tilting to the right of the spectrum.

Now with the 2008 campaign I started watching to see if Barack Obama would make any headway in this world. As far as politicians go he’s the most wired person this side of Al Gore. He walks around with multiple phones on his belt, he hired a Facebook co-founder to co-ordinate his new-media campaign, and has otherwise used the internet like nobody’s business. John McCain on the other hand doesn’t now how to use a computer, is merely “aware” of the internet, and aids have to remind him not to say “The Google.”

So does that mean the IT people I work with would warm up to Barack Obama? Not exactly.

I am finding my current set of colleagues more libertarian in their worldview. If they have a view at all they are more sympathetic to Ron Paul, who is no slouch himself when it comes taking advantage of the internet in a political campaign.

I was reading a family member’s blog about the practice of non control and found the timing impeccable. This relates to a couple of situations in my own life. At the heart of the blog post is the notion that we can’t control our circumstances, but we can control our response to them

Personally, I’ve experienced a series of home repair issues. In one week my cable modem quit, the refrigerator followed the modem into oblivion, and finally something broke in the bed frame. When the cable modem broke I cursed as I was trying to get some web updates for a friend out the door. That week happened to be the pay period were my company handed out semi annual bonuses. That bonus paid for the modem. The question then was I lucky the bonus came along when it did, or was responding to the circumstance with that awareness?

With the refrigerator, we purchased a new one with savings earmarked for such emergencies. The hassle of living out of coolers until the new refrigerator was delivered was lessened by the awareness of having the emergency cash ready. My response to the refrigerator was less frustrating because I responded to the circumstance with an appreciation for my wife’s diligence in building that emergency fund.

I handled the bed worst of all. A bolt broke in the bed frame and everything fell apart. All it took was a trip to the “guy zone” in the basement to retrieve a new bolt. The repair was easy and simple. But this happened as I was focused on some chunk of code on my monitor and was irritated by the interuption. In the end, my negative response made a simple problem into a needles fit of cursing and swearing.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love Share Point.

Professionally, I’ve also noticed being mindful of one’s response to circumstances helpful. At work we’ve rolled out Share Point. I can’t say what the reaction has been company wide, but among the people in my immediate vicinity there has been some resistance. My department has its issues with Share Point, but as a group we took the attitude that it’s here, it’s paid for, it’s not going away, so let’s see what we can take advantage of. As a result we’ve done some things that other departments are looking at as a model for some new initiatives.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love SSIS.

Last year I moved from being a head down code monkey to a DBA and database programmer. I found myself faced several ETL projects sending data to external sources and retrieving external data for our data warehouse. We are a Microsoft shop, which means I have all the tools of SQL Server, SSIS and so on.

Looking at the projects I saw that I needed to become an expert in SSIS. But the attitude I got from others about SSIS was one of disdain and frustration. There was considerable skepticism about SSIS and lots of complaints.

Here comes the part about being mindful of your response to circumstances. I recalled an adage from my days as a pipeline construction worker. One day someone was complaining about some equipment and this old timer barked out “bad operators always complain about equipment… good operators make bad equipment work.” With that in the back of my head I plowed ahead with SSIS. As a first generation product it has it’s quirks, but I’ve been able to do some pretty powerful things.

Putting it all together, I am now working on a project where I am integrating Share Point with external data using SSIS. I have a new refrigerator, a new cable modem, and Share Point is playing well in the same sand box with SSIS.

I have to say, Word Press is a beautiful thing. In the next couple days I plan to write some thoughts on SSIS.