I meant to.  I really did. But I got sick last week , and my energy level has been slow enough to come back that my focus was entirely elsewhere until about six last night. I panicked.  I gave fleeting consideration to throwing something hasty together, but everything I came up with struck me as lame, abusive to my audience, or (frequently) both.  The fact that most of it also wasn’t funny was also a factor in my silence. I slept soundly, which is always nice after such a difficult

..but, once again, the dark underbelly of human nature has shown itself in my trackback pool.. Back in March of 2008, I went off on a little two - post rant about for-fee aggregators.  At the time, I said: For awhile now, I've been aware that there are several sites out there which are reposting the RSS feeds from several Microsoft blogs, including this one, along with advertising which they have sold.  I'm not going to post any URLs, because I don't want to drive any traffic in their direction. 

Earlier this week, I got my session schedule for my talks at this year’s Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 Developers in Barcelona . DAT04-IS, SQL Tricks from Microsoft IT, will be offered on Tuesday, 11 November from 1:30pm until 2:45pm. DAT03-IS, Real-World Indexing Strategies from Microsoft IT, will be offered on Wednesday, 12 November from 3:45pm until 5:00pm. If enough of you sign up for these sessions, additional offerings will be scheduled.  I hope to see you in Barcelona!      -w

La Font de Canaletes is a public fountain near the head of La Rambla de Catalunya in what it currently the center of Barcelona, Spain: When I was in Barcelona last November, I reported that I "drank generously from the fountain, hopefully sealing my fate."  The fate to which I referred is the local legend which holds that visitors to the city who drink from the fountain will one day return. I got confirmation earlier this week that I'll be returning to Barcelona November 10-14 for

If you've left a comment here since June 4th, please repost it with my thanks and apologies. I tried to do a bulk approval and I did a bulk deletion by mistake. One of them was a question about TOP with ORDER BY that I'll attempt to reproduce in a few minutes. One was a get well message from my colleage Kyle Schoonover (thanks, Kyle!). The other two have slipped my exhausted mind.. Further proof that sick people should stay away from heavy machinery. More soon.. -wp

In the age of the blog, it may well be that republishing is the sincerest form of flattery. The same RSS technology that many of you use to read the blog through wonderful rollers like this one also can be turned to far more nefarious purposes. I'm going to rant a bit about one particular instantiation of this nefariousness. One of my favorite things about http://blogs.technet.com is that there are no advertisements on the site (other than the Microsoft branding, which it seems to me comes with the

Day 2 of TechEd Developers was also the only day of the conference during which I had no presentation obligations. Since I slept through my first intended tourist interval on Sunday , today was the day to see things that don’t involve hotels, convention centers, or airports. What a day I had! I started at the Temple Expiatori de la Sagada Familia ( Temple of the Sacred Family ). This indescribably epic structure has been under construction since 1882 and is expected to take another 30 years to complete.