I’m going a bit meta in this blog post; I’m talking about blogs and blogging.

Very recently I updated the theme of this blog from Wordpress Twenty Eleven to the new Twenty Sixteen theme. Though I was happy with the old theme there was some custom CSS that meant that it did not render to great on the mobile site, and as this is the age of mobile internet, a change was required. Fortunately the new Twenty Sixteen theme included some of the custom changes as default, as well as a few new feature I liked, so the change seemed sensible. I’m not too keen on the blue and pink colours I chose; they’re a hangover from a change I made back in 2014, but every time I almost commit to a change in colour I back out and revert to the old colours. Still, I then remind myself that roughly 0% of the people who visit this blog notice or even care. Content is king!

When I started out blogging, I had a few ideas about what I’d blog about and I also had a few ides about how I’d blog about them: that is to say, when I write a blog post on something technical, I want to leave no one behind. Even more specifically, if I share a PowerShell script that needs to be dot sourced, I’ll include a bit about how to dot source a script, and so on. This was fine initially, but roughly ~300 blog posts on and the “leave no one behind” ideology is beginning to wear me down. I’m less keen on blogging how to’s or technical topics in too much detail as the level of detail necessary to ensure that even someone who is relatively inexperienced can pick up on the subject puts me off. So today I decided that I’m abandoning the “leave no one behind” approach to writing blog posts. They’re to pedantic to write, probably frustrating for the more savvy reader, and I’m taking the view that if someone is wiley enough to search the internet and find something useful in one of my posts, then they’ll probably have the gumption to fill in the blanks themselves. I still plan on demos and examples though, as they’re usually more informative than a block of text.

Back in January I presented at the SQL Supper User Group. The subject was about Clustered Columnstore and Partitioning. I felt it went well, so I have been pencilled in to speak in June at the same user group. Though other user groups are available, commuting long distances when I have two children under 3 at home is off-putting, and the SQL Supper group are a friendly bunch. I’m going to be presenting on log shipping and how to make the restores faster for a read-only instance. Log shipping read-onlys may not be new or exciting or even a particularly sexy subject to talk on, but for some people out there it may be the only option they have, so to maximise the performance is critical.

I just read over last years “Easter Musings”, and it was this time last year that I bought a Surface Pro 3. And one year on, I still ave it, but only just. It caused me nothing but problems until I did a complete re-install of Windows 10, and then it started to work a lot more consistently. Also, one ofthe reason I bought it was so that it would fit in my tiny messenger bag, and it does. However, with only a mini display port i have to carry an adpater, and as it only has one USB port I have to carry a USB hub with an ethernet port as well.The keyboard case is damn good, but the tracker pad is awful, so I need to carry a mouse, and subsequently a mouse mat. So all this stuff adds up. The Surface Pro 4 looks better, but still fails to address any of these issues, and if I had another chance I’d pass up on buying the Surface Pro and opt for a bigger, more powerful laptop with more ports and buy a larger messenger bag. As far as performance, it handles light dev work OK, and of course I tend to log into servers to do other work, so it’s adequate in that respect.

This weekend it’s Easter, so if have the pleasure of a four day weekend to look forward to, I hope you have a good one, and if you have to work as normal, I hope it is as frank and productive and as crisis free as you want it to be.

Happy Easter!