Ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek

Yesterday I was asked to give a lecture at the University of Arkansas. No, it’s not going to be on SQL. It’s not even remotely related to technology. It’s on issues translating ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek into modern English. I’m speaking to undergrads in a World Literature class taught by Keely Kotnik, the wife of friend and coworker, Alex Brice. She is a writer and teaches while pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Arkansas. I don’t often get the opportunity to discuss my hobby with others, so needless to say I’m very excited. Perhaps it was my love of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin that lured me down the SQL path. Or perhaps it’s further proof that I’m just an inveterate geek.

Tulsa SQL Server user group

I had a great time at the Tulsa SQL Server user group last week. I gave a presentation on partitioned tables. Although no one there was using partitioned tables, many were interested and several asked good questions regarding when to consider using partitioned tables and how to implement them in a production environment. Thanks goes to David Walker for inviting me to speak (although he was visiting another professional group, the one in Orlando whose members wear hats with big mouse ears ;-) and Patrick Kurz for doing an excellent job running the show in David’s absence.

I’m looking forward to IndyTechFest 2008 on Oct 4th. I’m particularly interested in hearing Jimmy May’s presentation “Disk Partition Alignment” and Dave Leininger’s “Lessons on Event and Error Logging.”

At Tulsa TechFest (Oct 9th and 10th) I’ll be presenting a session in the eMarketing and Business track entitled “Learning from the Giants: How Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot create, consume and leverage data.”