Clayton Christensen on Hardship

I’m currently reading Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life. Before hitting Add to Cart on Amazon I spent a few minutes searching the web for things he’s written and for things written about him. I came away with several quotes and ideas. The guy is something else. From Forbes:

I’m an optimistic person. But for the first time in my life, with all my problems, I focused more and more on me–and it was depressing, literally. Sometimes I just wanted to quit trying to learn and speak and write again and just go into my basement and build furniture. I learned an important lesson from this. I learned that focusing on my own problems does not bring happiness. God didn’t say, “Okay. For those with problems it’s okay to focus on yourself. And for those who don’t have problems, I want you to focus on helping others.” Even in dire times God does not exempt me from his commandment to focus my life on others, because it transforms hardship to joy.

Another article ends with this powerful quote:

The person I decide to be has to be robust enough that it doesn’t matter what happens in my life… Life will happen to me. But I don’t want what happens in life to determine who Clay Christensen becomes.

People always ask others, ‘What do you do? They should be asking, ‘Who are you?’

Jake Warga

The Accidental Millionaire – by Gary Fong

Maybe you haven’t heard of Gary Fong. Even though I’m interested in photography, I hadn’t heard of him until a photographer buddy clued me in. He is known as an innovative wedding photographer, entrepreneur and writer.

In The Accidental Millionaire, Fong tells us his life story so far, giving the details of the personal philosophy that has worked so well for him. This is not the same recycled self-help crap everybody else writes. In contrast to vision, goals, tasks and actions, Fong’s more Zen-flavored philosophy comes down to exploring things that interest him, creating space for insights to happen and then working his ass off. He admits he acts on hunches, sometimes decides by flipping a coin and understands the role luck has in success.

This book will be appealing even if you aren’t a photographer.

Continue Reading…

Jack White on Restriction and Creativity

Tips, Tricks and Hints for Using SSIS from A-Z

A while back I started keeping a list of all the things I learned to make working with SSIS less painful and I thought I’d share. These are small things: tips, tricks and hints. Just stuff I wish I had known when I first started working with SSIS.
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SSIS Output to Multiple Files

Let’s say a user asks you to create a flat file output from a database query. Piece of cake. Open SSMS, write the query, run it and copy the results (with headers using SSMS 2008) into a text file. Send the user the file and and you’re done with time left over for a siesta.

But oh wait—they want to be able to open it in an older version of Excel, which will only display ~ 65k rows per sheet. This file has 190k rows. So they ask you to write the output to multiple files, limiting the total rows per file to 60k.

Now what?

You could simply open the raw flat file, go to line 60,001 and cut-paste lines 60,001–120,000 into another file and repeat as necessary. That’s ok for a one-off task but not a good strategy if you are going to be doing this several times. It can be cumbersome and error prone to manually create several files this way.

No—the better approach is to make SSIS do the heavy lifting. I had to do this recently and thought I’d share my solution. Continue Reading…

Notes on Marketing and Promotion

I made these notes during last night’s HYPE event: Entrepreneur Roundtable – Marketing & Promotion. The speakers were Caitlin Thayer of Barefoot Media
and Andrew Wood of Mintz & Hoke Communications Group. Caitlin and Andrew discussed brand, marketing, social media and small business success. These notes aren’t their words verbatim so if anything sounds wrong, the blame is mine. Continue Reading…

People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t rocket science—we’ve chosen one of the world’s most simple professions.

—Jack Welch

The Well-Dressed DBA

Don’t laugh.

You may not be aware of this fact but DBAs (database administrators) are actually world renowned for their impeccable display of sartorial savvy. What the average man knows about fashion would fit nicely within a CHAR(4) field. What the DBA knows about fashion requires a VARCHAR(MAX) field. At least.

By the way, the author would have you know that he can speak with total and complete authority on female DBA fashion as well as male. But he will let a female DBA tackle her own sex. Today he will tackle only the male.

Moving right along then, we will begin at the bottom and work our way to the top. Continue Reading…

SQL Server 2005 How to Change Default Backup Location

In SQL Server 2005, you can easily change the default location for log and data files. Open SSMS and connect to the instance you want to configure. Right-click on the instance and choose properties. Then select the Database Settings page and change the Database default locations.

Clickity-click-done. (I know, being a DBA can be tough sometimes.) Continue Reading…

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