Lewies Blog

Today we had a brown bag presentation during lunch and we all got to dig into a few variations of pizzas. It’s been a while since we had either. Towards the end, the head guy at the office presented me with an award from our division in CSC.

I’ve gotten awards from the company before, but this one is pretty high. The process of how people are selected was explained and somehow this sets my elegibility to get a higher award accross the whole company.

So there I was the other day.  A new employee was having some difficulty connecting to a database.  I confirmed the problem with another coworker and was about to make sure that everything on my end was setup properly.  Before I got a chance to leave, a couple more people join us in his cube to make a total of 5.

While one of them was speaking, other other spit out his coffee all over me.  He was very apologetic.  The managers assistant took the new guy somewhere for paperwork wile the other two cleaned up the desk and I went and dried myself off.

So later at lunch I got a fortune cookie that said I would avoid a bad situation of some kind. At the staff meeting later in the day I sat next to the spitter.  People were jokingly surprised and I handed them the fortune station that I was safe.

It’s been a long time since it has happened. Today was a very quick day at work.  I got so much done and then it was time to go home.  I wasn’t even drained at the end of the day.  I’m still trying to figure out why this has happened.  For a long time, I’ve come to work just waiting for the end of the day.  I still get stuff done, but it’s usually just a bunch of bland days.

I’m comming up on my 5 year anniversary with my current company.  Along with it, 5 years that I’ve known my wife as well.  I met her after I got hired, but just before my starting date.  I got an email regarding a recognition award notification.  I went over to the website and noticed lots of clocks for the 5 year employees.  There were watches, pens, glassware and even a set of eating utensils.  I went with a nice silver clock.

Before this job, I hadn’t lasted anywhere longer then a year.  I would always move on.  This is the first company that I’ve been with that actually has people who make a career at it and retire.

I found that I have an option to take residence in an empty office where I work. It’s been empty for about a year now. As one of the senior members, I found it odd that I wasn’t asked if I wanted to move into it from my cube. In the past, I have been asked regarding other cubes that are next to the windows, but I’ve always turned them down.

I have the largest cube, and it is quite comfortable. I can see the windows from where I am and it is just across the hall from the team lead. An office would be nice. It’s a status symbol of sorts. It gives the impression that you are important along with seniority.

The office in question does not have any windows. There are not any windows to the outside world or even any that look at the cube farm. There is a bit of privacy I guess. I can even lock the door as I wish to keep my laptop and other possessions safe when I go out to lunch or go home at night.

The team lead has told me that it feels like she is working form a basement in her office. Even the sound of the air can be bothersome at times. Still, she has not opted to move out of the office and into the cube farm.

These are the things that I ponder about.

I ate Totino’s Original Crisp Crust pizza for lunch today. It was the kind that you get from the store in a small box about a foot in diameter. When ever my wife and I go shopping together, she points it out to me and tells me to pick up a few. Shoppers Food Warehouse is expensive. They sell the pizza boxes for $1.59 each. The same brand is sold at Wal-Mart for only $0.95 each.

How is it that the price range is so different? I can understand pennies, but 33% cheaper? I thought it was a deal too good to be true for a long time. I would stock up my freezer with these pizza boxes. A few times I had bought too many. I would spend a good amount of time rearranging things and and ended up having to eat a thing or two to make room.

There are a good variety of pizzas to choose from. Cheese, Pepperoni, and Supreme to name a few. I’ll get tired of the flavors sometimes, but the cheese ones always taste great regardless. They are easy to make. You are supposed to cook them in the oven. I just nuke them. It took a while to figure out the best way. I nuke it for 5 minutes on 50 percent power if they are frozen at home. At work, the pizza is usually thawed by lunch time so I just nuke it for 2 minutes on high.

I got up bright an early today. I got up a few times, but I eventually left at 7:30. It took about 3 hours to get to the city, get lost, get lost more, hunt for a parking lot, and arrive at the Washington Convention Center. I totally missed the keynote speaker.

I got a bag of goodies and started going around and meeting with different vendors of software. I had a lot of interesting conversations and was able to broaden my knowledge of what was out there exactly. I also got toys.

I met up with a co-worker and after the morning session, we took a cab over to her place for lunch and to figure out how to configure her laptop. After getting back to the convention center, we split up and attended different tracks. I was going for databases and the like, and she was going into development.

I was simply amazed that T-SQL now has try/catch blocks. Can you believe it? I used to write a lot of code to handle transactions and checking to see if a number of SQL statements had failed. There was much more in the stability of the databases and the ability to read tables when a transaction had not yet been committed. They went into the CLR integration too. It seems that you only use that if you are doing some heavy logic that SQL wasn’t really meant for, such as using arrays.

I looked at the last two events on the schedule and wasn’t all that amused about the database track. I switched over to the development and joined my coworker. We sat through a web application development. I had already known about most of the stuff coming down the road. I found that other things you could now do, were already being used in a similar fashion in past projects I worked on. It’s nice to see that I was headed toward the rite direction.

I stopped by the place where I registered and dropped off my survey. In return they punched a badge that had my managers name on it (since I took his place), and handed me a shirt and a copy of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and the MSDN Library.

On the way home, traffic was slow. I looked over to see if I could change lanes and I ended up rear-ending the car in front of me. No one was hurt and the woman saw that there was no damage. I wrote down my information anyway and handed it to her with my Insurance carrier, license plate, name and phone number.

Continuing home, my engine kept feeling like it was going to stall any minute. The engine light was solid on most of the way, but would sometimes blink. It felt like it had most problems when I was stopped at lights, or accelerating - especially up hills. I’ll have to get that looked into soon.

I got all my toys out and offered a few to my wife. She liked the flashing HP necklace. I tried on one of the shirts. Another shirt that I got came wrapped up as a brick. When I unfolded it, it was a mess of wrinkles.

I’ve thought about this question many times, as it affects my industry of work as well as many others. Usually I come to the conclusion that India, China, and Mexico are cheap. Although this opinion may be true, another reason has been creeping up. It is a reason to fear.

Maybe, just maybe America doesn’t have enough people qualified for the job. Actually, strike that. The real opinion is that we don’t have enough people who are capable of actually doing the job. I have come across this idea due to the many interviews that I have been going through. I have seen viewpoints from different people of what they saw in interviewees that I hadn’t thought of.

It doesn’t matter if they are prompt or well dressed. Most people look great on paper, but as soon as you get them into a room, you find that the Masters degree doesn’t equal experience or technical expertise. Even the past job experience doesn’t help, as some people can’t answer common questions about the basics who are applying for a senior position. So for this reason, I state that they are qualified, but not capable of doing the work.

It has come to my opinion that many managers hire based on charisma and paper. The staff under the manager is valuable to determine if the interviewee is capable of actually doing the job. Fortunately, I have a manager who can jump on both sides of the fence but is willing to let the team lead and I to do a more in depth interview in technical capabilities.

This is where the testing starts to come in sometimes. You need to test the individual not only on there memory and presentation, but on there abilities as well. Make sure that the test isn’t overwhelming. Make it easy and open ended. You don’t need to test them on the full spectrum of the position, just enough to get a feel for there work aptitude. The person should be free to flaunt there skills if he/she wants to, but at least be capable of doing the basics. Make it known that they may ask for assistance, and whom or where to go to. All resources normally available on the job, such as the internet, should be available to the person as well.

Be optimistic. Finishing a test isn’t important. The test is to determine capability, not quality work with a deadline. Remember that they feel as if they are under a lot of pressure, no matter how big there smile is. Question them on what they would have done had they been given more time. Observe the results to see if they were going in the rite direction. Keep your cool and don’t get upset. Keep your charm and professional attitude towards the person. Testing, if done adequately, can assist in determining if someone can do the job. It can also help you prepare there training should they need it if they are hired.

Finding people who know what they say they know, often times, are fairly shallow. It isn’t just me with this problem. I am finding that many friends in the technical field are almost desperate to find someone with in-depth knowledge of the skills required to do the job. The shortage of technical people in my field has got me wondering. Where did all of these people go? Are we just too specialized? Are we being too picky? There were tons of people complaining in the dot com bust of 2000 that they were loosing there high paying jobs. They seemed valuable at the time to be paid so much. Much like the industry at the time, these people were probably overrated as well.

So if we are lacking people to do the job, then what other options do employers have? One may say you can higher new people into the field and have them trained. This takes time and investment and can be problematic on senior staff being sponged dry of petty knowledge. There is much risk as the person could just take off with there newly found knowledge. The other problem is that if you are hiring people, there is a good chance that you actually need them to have a specific skill-set at the time that you hire. Who has money to throw at someone who doesn’t know anything?

A few months back, I noticed that the team lead had signed up for a conference (Event Code: 1032281417). It was a conference concerning the launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006. I had tried to go ahead and sign up for it myself since it was free. The last software launch that I had been to was about eight years ago. I found the website and saw that every city that was being visited was sold out.

Today the team lead came to me and asked me if I was interested in taking my managers place next week since he was going to be out of town. Can you believe it? Just my luck! Yes, yes, yes, oh-yes mam. I do believe that I would really like to go thank you.

I looked over the ticket again and again reading all the little details. There weren’t many of course. It was just a printed web page with a bar code on it and the title of the conference. It was hard to contain my excitement. It was an all day event scheduled for next Wednesday at the Washington Convention Center.

I went to my managers office to thank him for the opportunity to go. He was glad that I could make use of it. He was also wishing that he could go, because he wanted to walk away with complimentary versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 given out to all participants. That just raised my excitement further.

Ever since my MSDN subscription expired, I couldn’t get into the website to get my software registration keys for VS.Net 2003. This has deterred me from reinstalling my system to clean up all the junk that has accumulated on it over the years.

The agenda itself looks very interesting.

Join Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer* and key Microsoft Executives for the launch of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, SQL Server™ 2005, and BizTalk® Server 2006! This all-day event offers an opportunity to learn how the Microsoft application platform offerings enable organizations to gain better business insight and deliver faster results by easily connecting people, processes, and information.

Launch provides technical education for developers and database administrators in an environment designed for personal interaction with industry experts. In addition, this event showcases the technical evidence, customer success stories, and partner offerings that demonstrate the business value of these tools.

Highlights of this event include:

• In-depth technical education sessions, hands-on labs, and direct contact with development and database experts
• Attend structured training or hang out in the community area to get your specific questions answered
• Meet the Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server development teams for informal Q&A
• Network with like-minded professional developers and database administrators
• Hear about innovative products, solutions, and services from key Microsoft partners
• Walk away with complimentary versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005
• Celebrate after the event at a party featuring special musical guests*

7:30–9:00 A.M.	REGISTRATION Continental Breakfast available		COMMUNITY Partner Pavilion Ask the Experts Lounges: Theater and 1:1 Area Microsoft Learning: Technical Self-Assessments Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) Microsoft Mobile and Embedded (TBD) Microsoft Windows Server Coding4Fun (TBD) Peer Networking User Groups
9:00–10:30 A.M.	KEYNOTE SESSION Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer* and Key Microsoft Executives
	DATA PLATFORM TRACK	DEVELOPER TRACK	COMMUNITY Partner Pavilion Ask the Experts Lounges: Theater and 1:1 Area Microsoft Learning: Technical Self-Assessments Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions) Microsoft Mobile and Embedded (TBD) Microsoft Windows Server Coding4Fun (TBD) Peer Networking User Groups
10:45–12:00 P.M.	Building Highly Available Systems with SQL Server 2005	Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
12:00–1:30 P.M.	BOX LUNCH
1:30–2:45 P.M.	Architecting Scalable, Flexible and Secure Database Systems with SQL Server 2005	Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
3:00–4:15 P.M.	Delivering Business Insight with SQL Server 2005	Web Development
4:30–5:45 P.M.	Managing and Monitoring with SQL Server 2005	Smart Client Application Development & Deployment

*Nov. 7, San Francisco kick-off event only.

DATA PLATFORM TRACK
The Data Platform Track provides an in-depth look at the many new features of SQL Server 2005 that make it the most available, scalable, and secure database on which to build your mission-critical enterprise systems. In addition you will see how this latest release of SQL Server 2005 integrates with Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio Team System, and BizTalk 2006 to further increase your ability to meet the most demanding needs of your business. Throughout the day you will learn how to design, deploy, and manage these systems with SQL Server 2005 while also learning how to extract extra value by using the Business Intelligence features in SQL Server 2005 and the integration between SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk 2006.
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Building Highly Available Systems with SQL Server 2005
With SQL Server 2005 you have several new technologies you can use to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime, provide solutions for disaster recovery, and provide greater system availability to your end users. This session will show you how you can use:

• Peer-to-Peer Replication to improve availability and scalability;
• Partitioned file groups to enable partial database availability during recovery;
• Online index operations to reduce planned downtime; and
• Snapshot Isolation Levels to facilitate improved concurrent access.

We will also give you a preview of how you can use the upcoming Database Mirroring technology to provide fast automatic database failover simply and cost-effectively.
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Architecting Scalable, Flexible and Secure Database Systems with SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 is set to change the way database systems are built. With SQL Server 2005 you can architect solutions that are more secure, more scalable and more flexible. In this session, you will see, how you can use:

• SQL Server 2005 security enhancements to be more secure;
• SQL Service Broker, and Native Web Services to achieve greater scale; and
• Query notifications and cache coherency to improve both scale and performance.

You will also see how you can exploit new choices in data representation (relational or XML) and language support (T-SQL, CLR, XQuery) to build, and deploy more robust and flexible database systems.
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Delivering Business Insight with SQL Server 2005
Business Intelligence is the process of extracting new information from your existing data. This information is used by decision makers at all levels of your organization to make better informed choices. SQL Server 2005 offers powerful functionality that will enable you to better leverage the value of the data stored in your organization. This session will provide you with a glimpse of what you can achieve. Attend to see how you can:

• Quickly and easily integrate data from just about any data source;
• Deliver a rich and manageable analysis platform for OLAP and data mining; and
• Offer powerful structured and ad hoc reporting capabilities to your end users.

Watch as SQL Server 2005 “Integrates, Analyzes and Reports.”
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Managing and Monitoring with SQL Server 2005
You work hard keeping today’s complex data systems running reliably. It takes proactive design, and consistent maintenance and monitoring of the system to maintain optimal performance. With SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio Team System 2005 you have a powerful new set of tools to help you detect and resolve problems faster and sooner. This session will provide you with practical examples of how you can:

• Use code analysis to identify potential SQL injection errors;
• Validate an application’s production readiness using customizable business rules;
• Establish a proactive monitoring and response system using SQL Agent;
• Proactively monitor resource usage and quickly troubleshoot performance using Profiler and Dynamic Management Views; and
• Manage a large population of database servers using Microsoft Operations Manager.

You can apply these tools today to better manage and optimize the performance of your data systems.
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DEVELOPER TRACK
The Developer Track provides a comprehensive look at the new Visual Studio 2005 product line—including those features found in Visual Studio Team System. Throughout the day new features are introduced and explored using real-world scenarios. The majority of the content will be presented in the product with limited use of PowerPoint. While these sessions are linked by a common theme they are designed to be stand-alone, allowing you to freely “mix and match” community area activities.
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Visual Studio Team System: Managing the Software Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Visual Studio 2005 Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that significantly expands the Visual Studio product line and helps software teams collaborate to deliver modern service-oriented solutions. This session spotlights key features of Visual Studio 2005 Team System and demonstrates how integrating this product into the development process reduces the complexity of delivering high-quality, fully tested applications.

Introduced in this session is the Whidbey Rocks demo application that will be used throughout the developer track. The software developers at Whidbey Rocks use Visual Studio 2005 Team System to orchestrate the construction of their concert ticketing and promotion system, which includes Web applications, smart client applications, SQL Server 2005 databases, and BizTalk Server 2006 integration. The presentation incorporates five roles: project management, infrastructure architect, application architect, developer, and tester. While most of the actual development will be performed in the subsequent sessions, this kick-off session will allow us to explain the goals of the software, set up the team project, select a methodology, identify the team, design the architecture, and send out tasks to each of the team members to construct individual components of the application.
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Design and Development Tools for Building Mission-Critical Applications
SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and the .NET Framework 2.0 offer a compelling platform for building mission-critical service-oriented applications. This session introduces the features of Visual Studio 2005 that enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, secure, and reliable solutions using innovative designers, advanced code profiling and analysis tools, and an enterprise-ready platform. Among the highlights: how to use Visual Studio 2005 to incorporate SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, and other operations infrastructure early in the design process.
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Web Development
Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 combine to form a rich platform for building, testing, and deploying state-of-the-art Web applications. ASP.NET 2.0 is replete with new features, from data source controls and master pages to membership and role management services—features that reduce the amount of code required to create a typical Web site by up to 70%. Visual Studio 2005 features an all-new Web development interface that speeds the development process while offering a rich design-time experience and seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

The primary goal of this presentation is to introduce developers to ASP.NET 2.0’s most compelling new features and to the Visual Studio 2005 features that support them. A secondary goal is to demonstrate some of the ways in which Visual Studio 2005 Team System can benefit Web developers, and to drive home the message that ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2005 Team System offer a compelling upgrade to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1. An important take-away is that these products are second to none when it comes to building scalable, high-performance, Web applications.
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Smart Client Application Development & Deployment
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 greatly simplifies the development and deployment of smart client applications targeting both the Windows and Microsoft Office platforms. The smart client application is characterized by simple deployment, access to the application in network connected and disconnected states, and a rich end-user experience at minimal developer cost. This session demonstrates how to create smart client applications using Visual Studio 2005, ClickOnce, and Windows Forms 2.0. ClickOnce is Microsoft’s new deployment technology which combines the power of Windows-based development with the flexibility of Web-based deployment.

The central message of this presentation is that end-users and developers alike prefer software that provides a rich user experience with easy to access features and updates—software that enriches and simplifies the user’s experience in the most natural way for the task at hand. Supporting themes are rapid application development as well as a natural maintenance cycle, including maintenance and updating of tool-generated code such as typed-datasets. In addition to the development lifecycle, another theme of this session is the deployment lifecycle with easy updates for subsequent versions of your applications to the clients’ machines.
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Today I returned to work after a long vacation. I tried to get to sleep early last night, but thoughts went racing through my head. I hate when that happens. It is so hard to ease your mind into a peaceful state. I did get some sleep and was able to make it in. I felt as if I could doze off throughout the whole day.

I got a few things done. I helped one co-worker solve a problem he had about two weeks ago. My team-leader and I finished the main gut-work on another part of the same project. Our manager was so pleased that he offered us to go home early. It was around that time when the team-lead usually goes home, and I had a few things to get done before I was going to go.

My monitor that had blown up last week was replaced. I’m uncertain if it is my permanent replacement, but hey - it works. I was in another office when the system administrator announced that he got a big shipment of hard drives and memory to upgrade every ones machines. I asked what was going to happen with the old hard drives. He said he could see what he could do about getting me a 20 GB hard drive if I was interested. Anything is great for a backup drive! He also mentioned that I had a new desktop setting at my cube. That shocked me a bit. I had just gotten a brand new laptop a while back and now they are upgrading my desktop. Wow!

And at the end of the day, I came home to a wife that needed me more then the world itself.