For many families (and some busy individuals), getting a handle on one or more calendars can become taxing. If you don’t use a calendar at all and you still find that you are more effective than most then it’s time to look at publishing your own best-seller. The truth is, most of us don’t have the mental capacity to keep all of that information in our heads and remember it with any sort of success rate.

That’s where using Google calendars can become invaluable. I am both cursed and blessed with something called ADD. For those who are familiar with it that means there are flashes of brilliance mired by terrible follow through. Having a family calendar help get everyone on the same page and keep them there. While I have issues with the way that Gmail can work sometimes, the calendar feature is has been way more useful to me. Everyone is going to use it differently so I’ll provide the links I’ve used in the past when tweaking things instead of reinventing the well.

I’ve included some resources below that should prove helpful. I didn’t want to reinvent to wheel. When it comes to getting things working smooth with your iPhone or mobile device then that can be a different issue and if there’s interest in that I’ll be glad to point to some resources for that. Hopefully, this will give you enough information to want to check out that Google calendars has to offer. And hopefully you will take it to the level of sharing a calendar between more than one person (spouse) and improve coordination.

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2010/12/12/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-set-up-a-truly-useful-calendar/
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/04/18/how-to-share-google-calendar-caldav/
http://www.ehow.com/how_4550316_manage-family-schedule-google-calendar.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4752900_organize-whole-family-google-calendar.html
http://lifehacker.com/5611457/use-multiple-google-calendars-to-balance-your-college-life

For many families (and some busy individuals), getting a handle on one or more calendars can become taxing. If you don’t use a calendar at all and you still find that you are more effective than most then it’s time to look at publishing your own best-seller. The truth is, most of us don’t have [...]

This is my first time to participate in the T-SQL Tuesday so take it easy on me. I really do come in peace.

It’s funny to me that this is one of the key things that drove me into the SQL world. I blogged about this last year explaining how I “Cheated on SQL Server”. Things have kept going uphill from that point and there are no regrets, but I don’t guess I will ever go from Jack blogger to Master blogger. Sounds like I should be in a guild or something.

Seeing Argenis Fernandez (Blog | Twitter) post on Leaving DBA-Land it resonates with how I feel about the leaving the SysAdmin world. I’m not sure if you ever really leave it all behind. I find myself needing to know more than ever about storage (like SANs) and how it pertains to SQL. I find myself needing to learn more about networking and the bandwidth that matters when you are discussing how SQL talks to its friends (or enemies).

I hate code by the way, never will I specialize in writing code. I will leave that to other Jacks and Masters because I really don’t want anything to do with it. Some people’s minds just don’t work as well when it comes to that. I’ll just stick with beating you in the 40-yard dash (based off my high school time of course). I tend to gravitate towards the Database Administrator side of things with Performance and Standards. It’s kind of cool to be dogmatic about at least one thing in your career, so master the “art of saying NO” to those developers who want too much access, that way you can sleep at 2am.

What is wild is that while we are always talking about specialization, the DBA certifications are trending more towards the developer (at least they were in 2008). Crap…I don’t want to be a developer. Anyway, hope you have fun getting just a little bit closer to being a Master or Jack of some trade so that you can pay the bills.

This is my first time to participate in the T-SQL Tuesday so take it easy on me. I really do come in peace. It’s funny to me that this is one of the key things that drove me into the SQL world. I blogged about this last year explaining how I “Cheated on SQL Server”. [...]

I’m a pretty big fan of OneNote, and although I have debated switching to EverNote I always come back to it. I’ve been using it on the iPhone with some success and now Microsoft has released Lync shortly after porting OneNote over to the iPad and add SkyDrive functionality (limited) to the iPhone. IMHO, this opens the floodgates on what a business can do with iPhones and iPads as laptop replacements. I’m currently working on getting an iPad to use in this format so hopefully I can have plenty of test cases to write about. Maybe they will port Management Studio over so that we can use it as well. That’s going on the wish list.

I’m still waiting to get an iDevice on the domain to test with, but if you happen to try Lync on an apple device let me know how it is working out for you as I will hopefully be doing the same thing pretty soon.

I’m a pretty big fan of OneNote, and although I have debated switching to EverNote I always come back to it. I’ve been using it on the iPhone with some success and now Microsoft has released Lync shortly after porting OneNote over to the iPad and add SkyDrive functionality (limited) to the iPhone. IMHO, this [...]

Going in a slightly different direction than a previous post on “The downside to being in IT”, I saw a post by Michael Hyatt (Blog|Twitter) recently that had an infographic about why sitting down so much is killing  us. The biggest part about the graph for me was sitting at a reclined angle was actually less strain on  your back than sitting upright.  I guess you could argue that sitting that far back is going to put more strain on your eyes, neck, and other important body parts so maybe it’s a wash. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you do to help your body handle all this “desk stress” that we put on it in the office.

Going in a slightly different direction than a previous post on “The downside to being in IT”, I saw a post by Michael Hyatt (Blog|Twitter) recently that had an infographic about why sitting down so much is killing  us. The biggest part about the graph for me was sitting at a reclined angle was actually [...]

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Ever so often you have one of those moments where you know that you should have known something and been using it daily, because it would have shaved seconds off of your time to perform a certain task. I believe this one even constitutes creating a new category just for this sort of thing.

I found myself playing with a Solution someone had put together in SSMS that had Connections and Queries but I needed to change the connection. That lead me to this wonderful technet article that should have already been something I’ve used. This means that this whole time that I’ve had a query open in a window, I could have just right-clicked and hit the Connection –> Change Connection option.

I did find one negative aspect to this pretty quickly because the new connection will not show up in your object explorer window and I’m used to looking at that so that I know where I have been touching things. If you are careful you could end up forgetting which server you are connected to when you run that query.

 

Ever so often you have one of those moments where you know that you should have known something and been using it daily, because it would have shaved seconds off of your time to perform a certain task. I believe this one even constitutes creating a new category just for this sort of thing. I [...]

I know I’m a little late on mentioning that this great resource has been updated. Hopefully I can do a series on “tools in your SQL Toolbox” someday, but for now I’m just letting you know that there’s an update and it’s pretty cool. Two of the biggest new features are Tab Sessions and Execution Plan Analyzer. If you are not already using it for all of the other cool features that it has, now would be as good a time as any to go and check it out.

SSMS Tools Pack Download

I know I’m a little late on mentioning that this great resource has been updated. Hopefully I can do a series on “tools in your SQL Toolbox” someday, but for now I’m just letting you know that there’s an update and it’s pretty cool. Two of the biggest new features are Tab Sessions and Execution [...]

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
Karl Marx

I guess if you are only in it for the money you wouldn’t want to tell your friends about an excellent opportunity to improve, but I bet you aren’t that selfish. Why don’t you go ahead and pass on the word about a great chance to learn how to do things in SQL Server you’ve only heard others blog about.

So start off on the preview page to register or get a little more info.

Here’s a download of the calendar in your time zone without registering, but if you register then you’ll have your own shiny reminders and you’ll need that info to view the sessions anyway.

 

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
Karl Marx

I guess if you are only in it for the money you wouldn’t want to tell your friends about an excellent opportunity to improve, but I bet you aren’t that selfish. Why don’t you go ahead and pass on the word about a great chance to learn how to do things in SQL Server you’ve only heard others blog about.

So start off on the preview page to register or get a little more info.

Here’s a download of the calendar in your time zone without registering, but if you register then you’ll have your own shiny reminders and you’ll need that info to view the sessions anyway.

 

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. Karl Marx I guess if you are only in it for the money you wouldn’t want to tell your friends about an excellent opportunity to improve, but I bet you aren’t [...]

I can’t think of many products that incorporate a period in the name of their product, but Doit.im isn’t like any other product I’ve seen. I believe that I’ve finally found a tool that works for me on all levels of GTD (Getting Things Done). There are multiple clients so that regardless of where you are capturing data you should be covered. I stumbled across this software in the form of an Adobe Air application while looking for something else for project management. Turns out, this product met a bigger need than what I had been looking for. It offers clients for the iPhone, iPad, and Android so you’ll have your mobile device covered if you are using a non-Microsoft format. There’s also a download for Windows, but I tend to prefer the web client. The web interface offers an old version and a beta version, and I tend to gravitate towards the old version a bit more. The best part of all of this is that the software is free. I’m not sure how long it will stay that way since it’s a pretty slick tool in my mind and way better than some of the other implementations of GTD that cost money. It’s all in the cloud as well, so your data is accessible from multiple places. They are located in China, so you might want to check out the privacy and terms so that you feel comfortable. I would advise to always be careful what info you put out there with new software.

Drop by their site and give it a go, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. You can read more about them on their website. Check out the API and see what you can do with it.

Doit.im FAQ Center
Doit.im Dev Center (API info)

I can’t think of many products that incorporate a period in the name of their product, but Doit.im isn’t like any other product I’ve seen. I believe that I’ve finally found a tool that works for me on all levels of GTD (Getting Things Done). There are multiple clients so that regardless of where you [...]