Instead of working, I blog.

Just double posting for a while till everyone gets the hang of the new location. Don't forget that officially my blog has moved here and I won't be posting very much longer at this location.

I know Jen's already blogged on this, but this is my little contribution to the whole, how cool are we, theme.

Brad Mcgehee just came to speak at our user group and to my surprise he thought enough of what we're doing to write a blog about it.

So I thought I'd take this time just to explain a little more so maybe some more of you can start doing it at your user groups too.

I started doing this last year when it really started bothering me that the user group model is so limited. The problem is that you bring in a speaker to give a session on a topic, and next month you do the same thing with a different speaker and a different topic. The problem is that you don't have time to go deeper into any of the topics. You only get to barely touch on the subject and there's no time to really learn it. So I decided to start up a progressive class before the user group. I lasts like 6-8 mos and each session builds off of the previous ones. The downside however is that it takes you 6mos to complete the class, but it's better than nothing and it's a free class. I actually treat it like a real class that you would go to at a training center only I like to think I go into more depth sometimes.

It's a really good model because if you hold it before or after your main user group meeting the people are coming anyway so you've got a built-in audience. And you'd be surprised how many people show up to the group that never did before. So anyway, that's all I've got on that. I hope some more of you start doing this and if you do I'd like to hear how it works for you. And I'd like to also give a special shout-out to Brad for recognizing my genius.



Petri for us all

The Petri IT KnowledgeBase just opened up its SQL section and Jen and I are the authors. I know, Jen also wrote about this too... what can I say, I have nothing original so I have to steal others' material. Anyway, it's really a nice site they've put together for us so come check it out. Currently we've got some nice barebones "I know nothing about SQL" articles so if you're a complete newbie then you can start here and we'll explain what all this stuff actually means.