Neal Waterstreet

Atlanta Microsoft BI April meeting notes

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This month’s meeting was sponsored by Pyramid Analytics. Remote demo but a reminder about following up with questions in person at SQL Saturday Atlanta.

The topic this month was Power BI by Brian Jackson of Microsoft. Much more technicial detail in this presentation than the one’s I’d seen previously. Sounds like Power Query is here to stay. Lots of good demos and useful information as always from Brian.

Quick raffle for some shirts and we’re done. Lots of discussion afterwards about the upcoming SQL Saturday in Atlanta. I didn’t get an exact count, but looked like a good turnout.

Atlanta Microsoft BI March meeting notes

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This month’s meeting was sponsored by X-IO. Good demo of an interesting product that delivers very high performance. It would be good to see a full presentation in the future.

The speaker for this month was Aneel Ismaily presenting “Building a Custom ETL Framework with SSIS 2012”. A quick poll showed a surprisingly high number of people in the audience are still running 2008 versus 2012. Good overview of 2012 logging features and comparison with 2008. Lots of links to samples in the slides and some detail about specific tables. The presentation was well done and included some good comments and questions afterwards from the audience.

A quick raffle for the vendor giveaways following the presentation and we’re done. Like most meetings, it seems like there is more networking/discussion after the meeting than before. Good turnout for the meeting, especially considering many people are out of town for spring break.

2014 Goals: Q1 update

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So, already time to check in on my 2014 goals…

Certification
Status: No exams taken but I am planning on taking one next week.

Projects
Status: So far, so good here. Still no way to measure this though.

Healthcare SQL VC:
Status: First meeting isn’t until April. Plenty of work to do and I really thought we’d be further along.

SQL Events/Training:
Status: No problems here.

Learn something new:
Status: I’ve spent most of my time with R but will move on to something else soon.

Blog:
Status: So-so here – 5 posts total. No technical posts so far.

Technical Books:
Status: On track, I’m on my second one now.

Review Yearly Goals:
Status: This post qualifies, right?

In the words of Gus Fring “Well? Get back to work!”

Cutting the cable cord… 1 Year later

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It’s been a year since we cancelled cable. After the initial adjustment, its been much smoother than expected. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon provide more than enough to watch. It seems like most companies are beginning to pay attention and at least making an attempt to meet the streaming demand.

Even with all of the content, here have been a couple of times that I’ve missed it.

Sports and News

Not being able to watch MNF was awful, but I got by somehow. CBS got the new Thursday night NFL deal, so that will help. This was the first year that I didn’t watch the majority of the college bowl games. The MLB package is available for purchase on Roku, but there isn’t enough time to watch enough games to make it worthwhile. The Winter Olympic coverage didn’t show many of the sports I wanted to see and none of them live. The World Cup is going to be rough.

Sports is easily the biggest programming issue that remains with cutting cable.

As a news junkie, not having 24 hour news has led me to read much more than before . There are still times that it would be nice to have CNN/Fox/BBC.

System

The plan originally was to go with a HTPC, but then Roku, Plex and Aereo came into the picture and that combination seems to work well. No complaints here and I haven’t made any modifications this setup. Aereo’s DVR service isn’t perfect but it is good enough and I am still hoping they expand their channel selection. I purchased a Chromecast but haven’t really used it very much.

If anything happens that disrupts what I currently have I’ll look into a HTPC, but for now there is no need.

Savings

Now that the set up costs are paid for the only costs are the monthly service fees and any movies that we purchase.

Overall

At this point i don’t see any way that I’d ever go back.