Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of Microsoft exams. I’ve also spent a lot of time writing exams for Microsoft exam providers. And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve spent a lot of time in forums where I’ve been checking out what people say about the exams.
What amazes me is the number of misconceptions that people have about exams. So I thought it would be helpful to write a post that covers most of the ones that I’ve heard.
2025-11-21
I’ve heard people lately discussing the Save icon and how it’s not relevant now. The Save icons that are a picture of a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk are basically meaningless today.
I did have to laugh when I heard a kid who saw a 3 1/2 inch floppy for the first time comment that someone had made “a physical save icon”. I suppose that’s how it seemed to him.
2025-11-16
I receive a lot of email. Most of it is relevant to me, or at least was at some point.
That’s not the case for all my email though. A while back, I started receiving lots of email offering me things as a recruiter. But I’m not a recruiter. However, dodgy companies have included me in a list of recruiters for some reason, and then rent out access to the list to other companies in some way.
2025-11-16
I posted yesterday about how a small company can grow by being hired by a large company. But there’s another key opportunity that’s often even bigger.
Smaller companies often find a gap in the offerings of larger companies, and are able to create their own offerings to fill the gap.
I’ve worked with data for a very long time. And over that time, I’ve seen countless small companies and startups created. So many times, what propels them forward is finding a gap in a popular offering from a large company, and quickly filling that gap with their own offering.
2025-11-13
One of the best ways to grow a small business is to find something a large business needs, yet for some reason, they can’t or won’t do themselves.
This happens for many reasons:
Small companies often have deep niche skills that the large company either doesn’t have or can’t easily build internally (e.g., a boutique AI consultancy, a specialist in SQL Server performance tuning).
These small firms might work across many clients, so they’re exposed to the latest best practices and pitfalls the big company hasn’t yet encountered. Large companies often also have marketing-driven outcomes rather than just technically-driven ones.
2025-11-12
Lately, I’ve seen a number of people commenting that they think the Publish to Web options in Power BI aren’t secure. They are secure. You just need to use them appropriately.
When you publish to web with Power BI, all data in the semantic model that the user is allowed to see is visible, not just the data shown in the visual that’s on your report. There’s nothing to stop the user using DAX to get to it.
2025-11-09
I have been using Bunny Stream for hosting videos lately. I love those people. What a great service.
But I wanted to add a few videos to our SQL Down Under website that was a Hugo Azure Static Website. I added the embed code from the Bunny Stream site for the video, and what I found was:
At first, I thought it might be a screen resolution thing, but it didn’t work on either an iPhone, or on an iPad that had the same resolution as my laptop where things did work.
2025-11-08
I posted a while back about being able to have random advertisements for our training courses in the sidebar for my blog. You’ll see one to the right of this post.
That has been working great, and every time I do a new build (each day), each page ends up with a random course advertisement.
What I’ve now decided though, is that I didn’t want all the courses to show up with the same frequency. I wanted to assign a priority to each one, from 1 to 10.
2025-11-05
I was reading a Facebook post the other day, and it was talking about the sad tale of Keith Sapsford. Keith fell to his death from within the landing gear area of a DC-8 that was leaving Sydney, bound for Tokyo.
What was fascinating was that his fall was inadvertently captured by an amateur photographer named John Gilpin.
But why this fascinated me now, is that when I read all the comments about the post, the vast majority of the comments were saying that the photo was fake, that it was AI generated, and that this could not possibly have happened.
2025-11-03
I posted a while back about moving to using Hugo-based Azure Static Websites for my blog and other simple sites.
One thing I’ve had a number of requests for over the years, is a richer RSS feed for my blog. In particular, while I have a coverImage tag in my front matter, the coverImage didn’t appear in the default RSS feed. I had a few requests about that one. So I set about trying to add a better RSS feed.
2025-11-01
