I forgot to give a big thank you to Cory Foy for driving over to last month's .Net User Group meeting.  It was the first time I got a good look at Ruby and Rails and I see what the draw is.  It's a powerful tool for some really rapid web site prototyping.  A bit PERL'ish but not too much.

Went out and had dinner with my brother and his girlfriend at Tenga.  An interesting Japanese Resatuarant of my brother's typical style.  Very odd, very low end but some delicious street food style cuisine.

Pablo arrived safely in the luggage and enjoyed a down day on Wednesday.  He mainly slept and watched TV.

The first day of training went well.  We got past the preliminary stuff that I already knew and started digging into the details.  Lokking forward tomorrow.  The facility is on 71 West 23rd and is pretty cool.  It's on the 5th floor of a Free Mason building.  The class size is very small so I am getting to really have a great dialogue with the instructor.  I think Pablo will be ocming to class with me tomorrow.

Space Coast .Net User Group

Sorry I missed last night's presentation, I am very curious about the Amazon Web Services.

BizTalk Bug

Still waiting on Microsoft to see if this blocking bug can be fixed with their patch.  It's taking longer than they expected for the hot fix.

New Data Warehouse project

Got to give have a technical proposal review with Harris' CIO this morning.  Went pretty well.  Had some excellent feedback and am looking forward to diving into my new HR Data Warehouse project!

SSIS Training in NY

Going to New York to get SSIS training on ETL for dimensional models.  The class is called Data Warehousing with SSIS (SQL Server 2005 Integration Services) and is offered by Symphic.  It promises to be a good class and I get to visit my brother in NYC at the same time.  I've brought my daughters Pablo stuffed animal with me and he'll be posing for pictures while Daddy's away on his trip.  Stay tuned....

I generally and very fond of webhost4life.  However, every once in a while, something just changes by itself.  Most recently, I had several permisssions change on my directories that brok DasBlog.  I didn't notice this untilI wrote a bunch of posts and didn't verify they were actaully posted after hitting save.  Lesson Learned.  Verify all posts.

I offered to give my VAB presentation to the Harris .Net Focus Group for both the experience and to encourage others to present.  It turns out that the engineering manager who sponsors the gorup had some money to get it catered.  And oh... they are also going to do it in conjunction with the knowledge transfer group.  40+ people to hear me speak.  I must modestly admit that it may have been the free food that brought out the attendees and not just the drawing power of my name alone.  It was a great experience and I trimmed the presentation down to 45 minutes which I think was perfect.  I had the uncomfortable expereince of fileding questions from a ventriliquist.  This guy kept asking questions and I could get not get a beed on his face to make eye contact.  It was crazy!  Thanks to all of those who attended and those who asked questions.  My next goal is to present at the Orlando.Net Code Camp.  Maybe a Data Warheousing primer.

We've been having a heck of a time lately with the BizTalk working queues filling up with ghost messages.  The level of blocking in the Database had become unbearable at certain times.  We had no idea where it was coming from as our activity levels have remained relatively constant (we hadn't found out about the queues yet).  We worked with MS support to do some cleanup of our produciton environment.  This seemed to help but then the queues kept filling up again.  After some focuse digging, we managed to stear ourselves and MS support to the solution.  A new hotfix just off the presses - KB936536.  We've applied it today and will see if it works.  I will post a more complete write up in a few days.