Back in 1996, as I watched a movie about Italy at the Drexel Theatre in Columbus OH, I decided that one day I'd live in Europe. I didn't need to move immediately. I just put it on my long-term agenda and figured things would eventually work themselves out with gentle guidance. Part of that gentle guidance was to …

This post is about all the things I use to fill my life with dark mode. I'm mostly writing to tell everyone about a free browser plugin, Dark Reader, that's incredible, but will include other extras as well. Dark Reader The browser plugin Dark Reader has changed my life and I'm obsessed with it. As I explained to a …

Well, if it wasn't my very first, it is close enough. Back in 1997, I was taking a computer class at a non-progressive college in Northwest Louisiana. Most of the tech classes still teaching Fortran and the faculty pushed back hard when I asked if we could work with more modern technology. I was disappointed with my …

I've been seeing quite a bit of posts about speaking mentorships and I wanted to share a few speaking tips I recently gave to my buddy Garry Bargsley who will be speaking about dbatools at SQL Saturday Phoenix 2018. The first time I ever spoke in front of a live audience was in Antwerp, Belgium for SQL Server Days …

Inspired by Adam Bertram being inspired by Lifehacker's How I Work series, I'm also doing a post about how I work ;) I really liked Adam's balanced assessment so I decided to follow in his footsteps there, too. Where are you located? Belgium, land of the free, home of the beer. Also home of the Belgian PowerShell User …

I always forget where to look when searching for various CSV formats to help with my scripting QA. Recently, I stumbled upon data.gov again and it's like, the best govrnment website I've ever seen. It's not only gorgeous, but it's also easy to navigate (Just hit the Data menu item at the top and search for some data.) …

I had the hardest time finding this information. I'm currently making a whole bunch of Animated Gifs to demonstrate the functionality of some of my SQL Server/PowerShell scripts (using a combination of Camtasia and iMovie. I'm trying to keep the size of the file (and thus the video dimensions) small but the version of …

This blog has been modified to accommodate postings by my right hand tech companion of over 13 years, Brandon Abshire. Brandon has always been a part of NetNerds but only recently has decided to become more visible. Brandon has been working primarily at Qualcomm Inc for the past 7 years but starting this month, will …

I found a link to this site on Facebook's SQL Server Magazine fanpage. Free Fundamental CDs for IT Pros and Developers While you can order the CDs, I just went ahead and downloaded the zip files. The SQL Server CD is pretty basic, but I still managed to learn something from it =)

Thanks to everyone who has written to me about the name conflict between my WordPress plugin, Quick Code, and David Gwyer's plugin, Quick Code. I created the Quick Code plugin three and a half years ago so I'm not sure how the conflict happened but I decided to just rename my plugin to Dirty Code. I chose the name …