I haven’t written anything technical or SQL Server related for that matter on my blog for a few of weeks. Mainly because I spent a couple of  weeks in Florida celebrating my birthday. I did take my laptop on my holidays mainly because we booked everything flight, car, hotel etc online and I thought it would useful to have at hand if I needed it in an emergency. It is also useful to call home, SKYPE’s international rates are pennies and when you compare that to my mobile phone companies rates they are a bargain. The hotel in Orlando threw in free WiFi which was great.

A few days into the holiday I had a few issues trying to connect to the hotel’s wireless provider  and after some troubleshooting with the aid of the helpdesk I got connected.  I did have to uninstall my UK mobile internet provider software to be able to connect, which at the time I thought nothing about as I had all the software safely tucked away at home. Until I return home and try reinstall and the software and I get continuous errors on the setup. At the time of writing I have still not got to the bottom of the problem, granted I have not tried very hard but still!  I use the mobile broadband mainly for work I spend a lot of time out on site with clients and it comes in handy for checking mail and doing a little research. Its no big deal to me not to have it. I can pick mail on my iPhone etc but it is a just a PITA that it is not working.

I haven’t got the mobile internet fixed because I have a few things to do around the home since I got back from holiday. The garden in particular needed some attention, the grass needed cutting, fences need painting, and as the weather has been nice since we got back  to and where I live you need to make the most of the summer weather! I also have two one year old Golden Retriever dogs that missed us greatly while we were away and have been in need of lots of attention too since I have got back. I’m sure it will start raining again soon and that will give me plenty of time to get the mobile internet fixed.

I hope to get my next blog entry out for the next the T-SQL Tuesday event which all about the new features of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. Which is quite a wide subject I think you will agree. This event takes place on Tuesday 8th June and is being hosted this month by Jorge Segarre (Blog|@SQLChicken) and you can find all the details about this event on @SQLChicken’s blog.

It actually coincides quite nicely with a series of blog posts a friend of mine, Justin Hostettler-Davies, has been writing over on his blog. His series is titled “A SQL Server 2008 Feature a Day”, You can find his blog posts here.  Hopefully between now and next Tuesday I can take the opportunity to take one the new features and write a detailed blog post on one of them.

Anyway, hopefully this post has dusted off my blog and get me back into the writing groove.