Sunday, March 20, 2011

Overheard In Post-Operative Recovery

I'm not going to tell you who said this after having surgery, nor am I going to tell you who overheard it. It's important to respect their privacy, but this is too good not to share:

Oops. What?! My head fell off!

This Is The Face Of Inspiration

Meet Anthony Robles, one of the 2011 NCAA wrestling champions:


I had a lot of butterflies going out there. This year I think that was the biggest difference in my wrestling, was my mental game. Going into every match I was real relaxed, real calm. But before that, before this match, it was nothing but butterflies. I felt like I was going throw up, I was so scared I almost started crying. But it's just the atmosphere. It's the true athletes that are able to just overcome that.

He also said he's likely done as a competitive wrestler but would like to remain involved with the sport.

The original story is here.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

A Weekend To Savor

This has been a singularly enjoyable weekend. It didn't have the usual start for one of my weekends; I worked late Friday evening. This was the culmination of a week's worth of intensive co-ordination of the efforts of several IT groups in the US and Europe in fixing a major application outage. We got the installation of a home grown message queuing system -- think of it as active email, passing messages in a store-and-forward manner between two programs, instead of two people -- up and running, which let my application send supplier evaluation data to a global purchasing app.

It really is cool when efforts pay off that way.

For the rest of Friday evening and early Saturday morning, Lisa and I were straightening the house. Mom and Dad came for a visit on Saturday. They brought us one of the bird houses Dad modeled after the house he grew up in, and a free-standing full length mirror they don't have room for any more. We spent a good while just chatting, catching up on what's going on in our daily lives; then, we took them to Carter Brothers BBQ for lunch. We went back to the house for a bit more conversation and ended up watching the last half of Sweet Home Alabama on Starz. I had forgotten how cute a movie that is, but not how appealing Reese Witherspoon is. By then, Dad and Mom had to head on back home, and we scooted over to Greensboro to attend a Relay For Life fund raiser at Carvel Ice Cream. Such torture.

This morning, we slept in and got to spend time just reading. I watched the championship of the ACC tournament between my UNC Tar Heels and the Duke Blue Devils. Carolina came out very flat. In between Duke's big men dominating to start the game and the Heels having no movement away from the ball on offense, it's no wonder Duke opened by scoring the eight points of the game, leading at the half by 14, if I recall correctly. The Heels finally came to life with about 10 minutes left in the game, which was how they played their first two games of the tournament, but they never got any closer than 8 points. Today, the Blue Devils were simply the better team. Despite the Heels losing today, I've enjoyed college basketball more the last 10 days than I have in the last couple of years.

After the game, I spent a while doing some research on a new utility I'm going to be using at work over the next couple of months in conjunction with some database upgrades. We still use a fair number of SQL Server 2000 databases, and Microsoft is ending support soon. So, we're upgrading to SQL Server 2005. The SQL Server batch utility has changed significantly between the two releases -- it's the difference between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic.Net -- and I get to do the application upgrades.

I read a couple of tutorials on the new (well, newer) version, called SQL Server Integration Services, and I actually created my first executable package. This is going to make the database upgrade project go much more smoothly. Just before I finished my SSIS project for the evening, I heard some familiar music from the living room. Lisa had found Up on one of the movie channels, and so I hustled to finish up my work to catch as much as I could of one of my favorite movies.

It's added up to a pretty sweet couple of days.