Crocodiles fascinate me. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs, and until we came along and made weapons, they were a top-tier predator.
Recently I watched the end of a wonderful documentary from the BBC called Dragons Alive . Although my wife didn’t really want to discuss it at 12:30am, it really got me thinking about the nature of curiosity and its importance in how we advance science and through it, society.
2026-02-05
When government funding is tight, it gets harder and harder to get grants to perform fundamental research. The government always wants to see outcomes, and this means that the grants committees need to show outcomes. In turn, this often leads to research funding bodies doing one of three things:
Now while at first glance, that might sound a reasonable way to proceed, it’s not.
2026-01-22
So 2025 is done. It was both an interesting and a challenging year for me. I’m so glad for all you who have been reading my blog and hope you’ll continue into the future.
As a new year begins, it’s a good time to pause and look ahead — not with hype or predictions, but with a practical view of what will genuinely matter for data professionals in 2026. Across consulting projects, training course development, and hands-on work with SQL Server, Microsoft Fabric, and modern data platforms, several patterns have emerged that are shaping how teams build and operate data solutions.
2026-01-01
2025 has been a busy and challenging year for me. I want to thank all of you who have been reading my blog. Every week, there are more views than before. I’m pleased to see that, even when I’ve been posting daily.
Whatever your belief system, Christmas is a moment of pause for many of us, but it’s also a reminder of how much data shapes the world around us — even in the stories we grew up with.
2025-12-25
Recently, I read a news report about a study that concluded that cybersecurity training doesn’t work. I can’t say that I’m surprised by that.
I spend a lot of time mentoring on client sites, and many of the clients are large organizations. Often these organizations require me to attend “training” on a regular basis, to satisfy their corporate compliance goals.
I don’t mind doing this at all, even though it’s incredibly repetitive. The course on conflicts of interest, or handling private or sensitive data, or IT security at company A is invariably almost word for word the equivalent course that I do at company B, and company C.
2025-12-04
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.
2025-11-21
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 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
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
