Wow, there is a lot of excitement about the 2003 PDC for many & good reasons, but alais I'm not attending this year, and yet still I feel like I'll be there in spirit, if not in person because of this new (or new to me) blogging effort. Many from the .NET Development community and now the SQL Server community are blogging. Additionally, Microsoft is encourging their employees at all levels to blog about their activities and I think that this is a good thing as more information is much better than no-to-little information that can sometimes cause speculation and can be un-productive...
I've been able to track down many of the official and un-official 2003 PDC related blogs (via BlogRolls and cross-linked Blogs) from both Microsofties as well as others who are just attending or are presenters at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the week of October 26 - 30, 2003. This is an important conference for Microsoft as they will be releasing it's first public look at not only Yukon, but Whidbey and the new OS platform Longhorn. I've listed below some of the official as well as un-official web sites and blogs for you to monitor in the comming week, if you're like me and unable to attend...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/ - MSDN 2003 PDC Home page.
http://pdcbloggers.net/Default.aspx - PDC Blogger's Home page.
http://weblogs.asp.net/ - PDC Session List
http://weblogs.asp.net/pmarcucci/ - Constantly updated sessions data
http://weblogs.asp.net/RHolloway - Randy Holloway's Weblog on Yukon and the CLR
http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/ - Josha Allen's Blog
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/ - Robert Scoble's (very entertaining ;-) WebLog
http://longhornblogs.com/scobleizer/ - Robert Scoble's Longhorn Weblog...
http://pdcbloggers.net/Question_and_Answer.category - PDC Blogger's Q&A page
The above is by no means a complete list, and if you have you're favorite PDC related blog, feel free to email me and I'll post an updated list, just post it to in your blogs.
Enjoy!
Well, I'm finally back from my trip to L.A. and my adventure in 64-bit vs. 32-bit benchmark testing was extended into this week as well as last week and as it a very busy time for me, I was unable to blog during that trip... More on the benchmarking results in a latter blog once the final results analysis is completed. Now that I'm back, I'd thought I'd blog a bit about what's going on in my life... I live in downtown Kirkland, WA near Lake Washington and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. When I left for L.A. nearly two weeks ago, the leaves had yet to change color, and today during my morning walk down to the Triple J Cafe for breakfast and reading the New York Times (NYTimes), I noticed quite a bit of fall leave color among the trees.
The NYTimes is a paper I've been reading for over 20 years with regularity and while it may not have much about the Pacific Northwest, it does have some interesting articles from time-to-time. New Triva - Q. Where is the tallest building in the world? A. Taipei, Taiwan. The construction crew finished building the world's tallest skyscraper, a 1,676-foot-tall, 101-story building called Taipei 101. This new building tops the previous record holder, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kula Lumpur, Malaysia.
Another interesting NYTimes article 'Art and Science Meet with Novel Results' is a review of current and past science fiction novels by and about real scientists, including the new 'Radiant Cool' with a 100-page appendix explaining the theory discussed in this book. I've recently purchased Neal Stephenson's 'Quicksilver' book as I read and enjoyed his 'Cryptonomicon' book this past summer. I've only just started this book, but I was suprised that it was not referenced in the NYTimes article.
You'll note that I didn't reference the 'it' word (SQL) above, except in this paragraph, and that was on purpose as Blogs or WebLogs are more than just about a technology that we use everyday, it's also about who we are as individuals as well as our personal opinions and activities. I've spent some time searching and researching blogs and will post more links from time-to-time of other bloggers from MS employees to people in our industry (scroll down for a pic of Jim Gray) who have web sites &/or blogs about both their personal and professional lives.
IMHO, we who are bloggers at SQLJunkies (2nd reference), should not only blog about SQL Server, but also about our projects, opinions and views (to the extent you feel confortable with) that are both related to our work as well as to what you are passionate about and not just about T-SQL code, product announcements, or general questions that could be better answered in the newsgroups....
Let me know what you think by writing your own blog about what you did today or whatever... Why Blog?