U2 360 Tour – Dallas Cowboys Stadium

First rant: first and last concert @ the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. Paid way too much to hear a theoretically professional band play over the top with re-verb & delay. And the tin-metal construction of the stadium made it even worse. Unfortunately, I was not alone. On my way down for a smoke, I met [...]

Simple SQL alternatives to Full Text Indexing

I’ve been a SQL DBA for what? 10-12 years, with the last 7 having spent a great deal of time doing development as well as supporting production environments. Of these 7 years, I have spent none worrying about the dreaded Full Text Indexing service on Microsoft SQL. I have always managed to go around [...]

SQL – Finding missing records based on a date range

So I had a little bit of a quiz not long ago to prove my DBA prowess. The time alloted to complete it was roughly 30 minutes, which I thought was plenty to complete the most of 11 questions. Then came a scenario that left me scratching my head trying to figure it out. As the [...]

Dream Theater: What’s wrong with Dallas!?!?!

So…this is at least the second time Dream Theater skips Dallas for their Prog Nation mega -and definitely not the first time they skip it, period, after the release of a new album on their tour schedule. Don’t we have enough fans and prog-rock, metal & technical music “connoisseurs” around here to entice them [...]

Chickenfoot Rocked Dallas

And so it was, that a friend of a friend wound up buying extra tickets, and one of them landed on my lap. The concert was this last September at the Nokia Center, and I was primarily stoked that I was going to see the Satch live. What a bummer! Who would’ve though that [...]