Lured by Ward Pond, Chris Shaw’s Notorious SQL Quiz Ensnares Me In Its Web

Jimmy May — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:50:00 GMT

SQL IT Operations Excellence IP Architect, colleague, & friend Ward Pond tagged me in a meme started by Chris Shaw (aka SQLShaw who originally tagged a whole lot of geeks including Thomas LaRock aka SQLRockster formerly SQLBatman (R.I.P.) & still lover of bacon who tagged Jeremiah Peschka aka peschkaj who tagged Michelle Ufford aka SQLFool who tagged Jorge Segarra aka SQLChicken who tagged Ward aka sqltwit).

The Question

Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?

The links reveal many inspiring examples, including those cited by Ward.

One of my patterns for success has been emulating those whom I admire, & they’re the focus of this post.

The Anti-Patterns
I’ve had some great managers, but I’ve not been quite as fortunate as Ward. I’ve learned from the flawed role models in terms of what not to do. For example, one allowed political correctness (& fear of possible litigation) to wreck our team, rendering the company virtually worthless. A second had no regard for his employees. A second epitomized the Peter Principle. A fourth personified the word “weasel”. I moved on from all of these positions to bigger, better, & greener pastures.

The Patterns
Excluding my current management team, Amol Dalvi now of RightOn Interactive (ROI) was perhaps the best manager I’ve ever had. He taught me fair-mindedness to an extent I’d heretofore not known. Though he was in management, he is a full-fledged geek, & spent as much time in the trenches as the rest of us—including myriad long nights. He is one of the most honest people I’ve ever met. I know no one more capable of consensus building. Amol is also courageous. He left a perfectly good job to start his own company—& even in today’s climate things are going great!

Gary Rush now works as a CxO for Angie’s List, was easily the best executive I’ve ever worked with. Gary shepherded us through phenomenal growth with limited resources. Gary has two great skills:

Critical Thinking: He could listen, ask precision questions, distill available information, & provide exquisite guidance.
Grace Under Pressure: Gary handled some very, very tough circumstances with grace.

A.C.E. Team Management
This would be gratuitous pandering if I suspected my management actually reads my blog. Just in case they do I’ll not name names. Suffice to say that A.C.E. has world-class management befitting a world-class organization. My team has something which is missing at a lot of places: Integrity. I’ll spare details except to say that a deal we made when I on-boarded was honored 100%. They could’ve found wriggle room but they didn’t even try. Now that is world-class.

There Is No Fate But What You Make
My closing is timely, considering the release this week of Terminator Salvation.

In a separate meme, Ward in his most excellent What I Know Now: Ward’s Epistle to the N00bs tagged Kimberly Tripp & Paul Randal. I’m going to quote Paul’s Things You Know Now:

…a tenet I live by - there's no fate but what you make. It's actually a quote from the Terminator 2 movie and it basically means that nothing happens to you unless you make it, and you're responsible for your own life. This applies equally to life and to your career.

If you're not in an optimal place in your life for whatever reason (happiness, job, city, partner), then it's up to you to change it. And you should have the confidence to try. Sometimes you might try and fail, but at least you can say to yourself that you've tried. I've changed jobs, cities, and partners a few times each and (luckily for me) it always worked out. Sometimes the change was hard to make, sometimes it wasn't. But I knew it was up to me if I wanted a change so I had no choice but to make it happen or adapt to the current situation.

Paul’s prose mirrors my philosophy incredibly well. I even use “There Is No Fate But What You Make” as a signature tag line. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, I indulge in Intentional Living. It’s all about personal choices. Our happiness, our satisfaction, our lives—it’s all an inside job. It’s all up to us. There is no fate but what we make.

Administrivia

Jimmy May, MCDBA, MCSE, MCITP: DBA + DB Dev
Senior Performance Consultant: SQL Server
A.C.E.: Assessment, Consulting, & Engineering Services
http://blogs.msdn.com/jimmymay

This post was written with the PracticeThis.com plugin for Windows Live Writer

There is no fate but what we make. —John Connor

Does Your Blog Wordle Up?

Jimmy May — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:28:00 GMT

My multi-talented, java-enabled yet Windows-empowered friend Alik Levin of www.practicethis.com (among other blogs) subjected my blog to the machinations of www.wordle.net. Wordle creates "word clouds".

Another friend, Bob "Roudy Bob" Roudebush, Windows MVP & mild-mannered Director of Solutions Engineering at Double-Take by day, elsewise nocturnal denizen of the Internet, recently cited Wordle as well.

Stand back! We may be on the verge of critical mass...

Word Clouds
So what's Wordle? From the Wordle home page:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The Wordle gallery for this java app is fascinating, where I found Wordle's transmogrifications for text ranging from Genesis to the classic boilerplate Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Alik's Thesis: Wordle is a Measure of Focus
Alik's intriguing thesis is that Wordle can be used to visually demonstrate the focus—or lack thereof—of a web site or blog.

Wordling My Blog
Is he right? As a biochemist in a former life & in my current role as a high-performance engineer, I love to experiment.

My blog's description is:

Jimmy May, Aspiring Geek: SQL Server Performance, Best Practices, & Productivity
News you can use on implementation of the elusive sqlservr.exe /faster switch, personal effectiveness, etc.

Here's what Wordle did with my blog:

The conclusion:

Archimedes invents electricity.

In spite of my undisciplined digressions, ADD moments, gratuitous-sounding yet sincere characterizations, & off-topic rants, I've apparently been able to finagle my way back to my central themes.

<ADD>Speaking of ADD moments, my therapist will be thrilled to learn that I've been validated by a software application.</ADD>

Wordling a White Paper
Here's a Wordle of the latest-&-greatest draft of the white paper I've written for SQL CAT with Denny Lee on disk partition alignment.

Again, Eureka! (Don't hold your breath, but stay tuned for the DPA white paper...)

Other Wordles
Alik Wordled other blogs:

A Toy? Or More?
Is Wordle just a toy, or can it be an effective tool to analyze the focus of one's work?

Wordle's transmogrification of my blog & white paper validates Alik's thesis.

How does your blog Wordle up?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alik Levin & Roudy Bob.

Administrivia

Jimmy May, MCDBA, MCSE, MCITP: DBA + DB Dev
Senior Performance Consultant: SQL Server
A.C.E.: Assessment, Consulting, & Engineering Services
http://blogs.msdn.com/jimmymay
"If it is fast and ugly, they will use it and curse you; if it is slow, they will not use it." —Computer science professor, billionaire, & entrepreneur David Cheriton
This post was written with the PracticeThis.com plugin for Windows Live Writer

Jimmy May, Aspiring Geek: SQL Server Performance, Best Practices, & Productivity : Discipline

Lured by Ward Pond, Chris Shaw’s Notorious SQL Quiz Ensnares Me In Its Web

Does Your Blog Wordle Up?