What's Been Going On The Last Few Months...

I have been asked by a few people what I'm doing lately and I have been a bit vague on the details not because I want to hide away but because I really haven't been too clear on that subject myself.

Anyway here's a short update.

I left Edenbrook back at the end of February to do some bits and pieces (still MS BI stuff) for myself which has gone quite well, I'm now working on some other projects that will hopefully see the light of day over the next few months. I dropped out of the consulting game really because I decided to spend more time at home with the family and less time in hotels in various parts of the country.

The hobbies are the same with the addition of Tennis which I've taken up as I'm not allowed to play football anymore :( and any spare time is being taken up tearing it up in Liberty City.

I shall still be going to the V festival this year at Hylands Park as they appear to have pulled their finger out and got what appears to be their best line up in years, although Glastonbury having Jay Z seems to have helped with that.

I don't do Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, or any of the other so don't think me rude for not replying to friend requests etc on there. I may change my mind but then again I might not. I want a 3G iPhone, a new laptop and a quad core PC for doing all the stuff I do at home.

Oh and I went to the Natural History museum yesterday. My daughter and I thoroughly enjoyed it and here is a picture from our day.......

Apparently the Blue Whale is a lot sleeker than that but when they built this no one had actually ever seen one swimming....!

SAP have BO....!

I couldn't resist the almost register like title for the post....

It appears after many many months of hearsay and conjecture someone is finally going to stump up the cash and buy Business Objects. There's been a lot of talk around this area especially with Hyperion being absorbed by Oracle and further rumors about the future of Cognos.

Microsoft seem to be content with buying the smaller players and partnering with the similar smaller vendors to compliment their own technologies and now they've gone their own route for budgeting and planning it seems very unlikely they will do anything else but carry on that trend.

It will be interesting to see what effect this has, if any, on the close ties that SAP and Microsoft have had recently. We shall see.

Technorati tags: SAP, Microsoft, Business Objects, Business Intelligence, Vendor

Extended Absence.....

After what appears to have been an eternity of non posting (which coincidently seems to occur every August, holidays, V festival etc.). I shall attempt to make up for lost time.

So lets ease into this gently with music posts first....

Technorati tags: phoenix, flames, return, triumphant

Sorry it's been a bit quiet...

The lack of posts recently is down to my laptop being in the repair shop.....

No fault of mine just general wear and tear. As soon as I get it back then I'll have some stuff on SQL Server 2008, more MDM bits and some interesting things I've been up to with SharePoint 2007, not forgetting the things that i've been listening to. There's quite a lot of those as we enter festival season and yes I will be making the traditional trip to the V Festival in Chemlsford if anything just to see McFly...! (If you know me you know the truth).

Laters

Steve

Windows Live Write Beta 2

I've blogged about it in the past and it's still a great little tool. You can get it from here.....

http://writer.live.com/

Technorati tags: Blogging, Live.com, writer

If an Alien Dropped Down, Right Here, Right Now....

I have just had the displeasure / pleasure (please delete as necessary) to have spent a little time in Barcelona witnessing the English football teams victory over Andorra.

According to Wikipedia Andorra is a co-principality with the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell, Spain as co-princes.

According to the majority of the traveling supporter base of the England team, Andorran's are either taxi drivers, estate agents or butchers with the odd police man thrown in for good measure.

So where does the alien in the title come in? Well, the alien that dropped into the Estadi Olimpic on Wednesday night would have probably thought;

1. The human population is 98% male
2. The human population is 98% hairless
3. The human population is unable to construct sentences coherently
4. The human population are masochists.

For the love of God, lets hope the aliens go to a Brazil game instead...!

Other Blogger's

A colleague of mine has started blogging recently mostly in and around the SSIS area and I can categorically say he know what he's talking about.

Check it out here....... Colin's blog

Making The Client Happy...

Being a consultant involves meeting a lot of different people in a lot of different situations. Most of the people I meet are by an large pretty nice but not all. I shall stop there for fear of incriminating myself :).

One thing is consistent throughout everything I do in my job though and that is that I try to deliver the best solution possible within the constraints placed upon me, whether that be ambitious requirements, time, money, equipment, coffee, etc, etc. I do take a certain pride in what I do and the best thing to come out of it at the end is the successful delivery of a project with the users grateful for the spanking new BI implementation my colleagues and myself have put in place. And hey, if you get to play around with a few extra toys then that's a bonus...

This may counter the myth that as a consultant my role is to bleed the client dry and ensure that the people that command my time have enough cash to bathe in asps milk, ordering people to remove all of the blue M&Ms from large jars made from empty Playstation 3 carcasses whilst drinking fine wine made from the grapes of pandas! (In my head I know what I mean).

I do what I do because I'm interested in it and it pays fairly well at the moment. Ideally I would be a tester at a major games developer, but I can't see that happening until the mortgage is paid off, until then I'll just keeping BI-ing my heart out in the interest of the client.

There was a technical reason for this post but I think my rant went on long enough so I'll perhaps share that tomorrow when I've had a chance to investigate further..

A Note From The Editor....

Just a little clarification here. I am not a professional Dolphin trainer nor am I an amateur one either although I did once swim with a dolphin in the Florida Keys and found it to be a quite unfulfilling experience as the Dolphin was in a pool that I would consider to be the Dolphin equivalent of one of those Japanese capsule hotels.

The freelance dolphin trainer title comes from a time in my youth when life consisted of doing the things from this song below.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Editor out..!

Next Gen Blogging

I really wish I could blog more but I do find that the things I want to blog about do tend take a large chunk of time so when things come along that make blogging a bit more streamlined, I' first in the queue. Firstly the blogging support in Word 2007 is pretty good but I found it a little restrictive on occasion so now I've switched to Windows Live Writer.

I'm not going to write anything about it but point you in the direction of this, where you can get it, and the video below. Direct from YouTube and embedded with a couple of clicks from Live Writer.

Enjoy....

Secret Source of Pleasure..

... or not so secret if you check out some of my other links over there -->

I am the proud owner of a launch day purchased Xbox 360 and in my spare time enjoy the odd thrash on there. My recommnedations at the moment are

Geomtery Wars - for a quick thrash on the machine.
Table Tennis - so simple yet so enjoyable.
Street Fighter II - coming to Xbox Live Arcade today, god I wasted so much of my time at college on that game..!

If anyone fancies a round or two on anything my gamertag is one1eg (that's a one in there).

See you online.

Steve

Confession of a Freelance Dolphin Trainer...

Forgive me Blogger for I have sinned.

I've slacked in the blogging world in recent months so I thought I would get my ass into gear and whilst my time isn't complete monopolised with the daily grind I thought I would contribute to the amount of information currently in existence.

The next few post will be general updates on what is happening in my world be it work related or not.....

Steve

A Storms a Brewing

To say things have been quiet on here would be an understatement but there is a very good reason for this, content is going to be moved somewhere else and a lot more of it will be produced (minus the things I'm currently listening to).

So what more can I say but watch this space............

Normal Service Has Been Resumed

My deepest apologies for anyone who takes the slightest bit of notice of this blog but I am currently sitting in the "internet cafe" within the complex I'm staying at in Lanzarote on my honeymoon (there's dedication for you) and have found out that my blog was not functioning in anything but Firefox, whoops. I believe those problems have now been rectified but would appreciate a mail to yourblogisrubbish@stevemchugh.com if you spot any other bloopers. As a good friend recently commented, you#ll never be a web developer steve....

New W3 Tag

If you're doing any courses on SQL Server 2005 make sure it's based on the June CTP.

Ouch...!

Liverpool (whom I am not a regular fan of) won the Champions League final in what I must admit was pretty spectacular circumstances last night. I watched it in a pub and to say I feel pretty spectacular this morning would be wildly off target.

Now where are those asprin?

Jesus Was a Carpenter..!

I have spent most of my day today with MDF (not that sort of MDF) drills and nails. Lots of hard work and something presentable in the end. Nothing special, just boxing in some pipes at home but I actually quite enjoyed it.
A friend of mine stayed over the weekend and as he is at one with the ways of the chippy, I assisted him completing a task at home that has been on my agenda for some weeks. It does make you wonder about the whole sitting on your backside for 10-12 hours a day looking at a screen, surely it can't be good for you.
After the whole IT bubble has burst and most of us geeks have been thrown to the Wolves it's either going to be a Yak farming job in Tibet or something practical like today. Until then........

Bringing Balance to the Force

The eternal debate. Was Darth Vadar the chosen one and did he bring balance to the force. Personally I am of the opinion that he did, he just did it 20 odd years too late for the republic and Obi Wan's liking.

I've just seen the latest "film" in the Star Wars series. There are plenty of reviews out there, possibly even a non-biased one but here are my observations.

1. R2D2, what have they done to you. You now hop out of a ship like a demented jack rabbit with a blaster up your exhaust pipe. It's wrong, plain wrong.

2. Close your eyes and Hayden Christensen sounds like a character from Point Break. Bodacious master.

3. Solo, Yeah Han Solo, Remember him, no, never mind.

4. Take Endor, add a bit of water, pump the Ewoks full of steroids, you have Cheweys home planet.

5. Ian McDiarmid. This man is a god and by far the best thing in the George's "epics".

The subject will not be spoken of again........for a while.....maybe.

Blogging on the Rails

Finally I have the ability to blog on the move. This has traditionally been the reason for my more sporadic attempts at blogging over recent times but thanks to Pocket Blogger I can now let the world entertain my wildest (?) thoughts.

Art of the Referentially Intact

Clicking a wizard should be the easiest thing in the world. One push, out comes your desired result. Not tonight. I'm having great difficulty building a demo SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services cube because the data I've been given has very little integrity. So what does this mean for me? It means I'm missing the champions league semi final between Liverpool and Chelsea. It means I'm getting hungrier by the second and will probably have to consume a large amount of processed food on the way home and it also means I'm losing the feeling in my fingers due to the over active air conditioning in my office.
Hopefully I would have now cleansed the data to a point at which it can't fail but it severly reduces what I can demonstrate. Lets see what spanners await me when I try to build some Reporting Services reports off of it.....!