General

Knocking Access was a popular sport over the last decade or more. Many data professionals saw Access as a real problem. Lots of silos of unmanaged data grew up across organizations and things could get out of hand pretty quickly. I saw all the expected problems that come from a lack of centralized management of data.

Some issues were quite nasty. I remember doing work for a company that did aircraft maintenance and had depots all over the country. Every depot had a copy of an Access database, but every single one had then modified it in different, and in many cases, conflicting ways. Then they decided to centralize the data, and oh what a pain.

2019-10-08

Recently, one of my MVP colleagues was tweeting about the problems he was having dealing with a country DNS name provider, and how much it cost. I’ve thought this for a long time, but it really does make me wonder if there’s much value left in country-level domain names, at least for companies.

The Gold Rush

[caption id=“attachment_5623” align=“alignnone” width=“398”] Awesome image by Lucas Benjamin[/caption]

Back in the 1990’s, I remember the “gold rush” that happened when people where trying to register domain names for their companies and how intense the competition became. If you didn’t get in early, you were fresh out of luck. We made a point of getting all our customers to register quickly. Even then, some missed out on their ideal names, particularly if they were just trying to register a set of initials or abbreviation.

2019-10-01

I deal with a lot of different service providers, and something that really sets the good ones apart, is their ability to avoid customer issues.

Can your staff avoid customer issues?

Awesome image by Holger Link

Years back, I used to deal with our largest national airline, QANTAS, a lot. They were actually pretty good at helping you out once you had a problem, if you had status with them. What they were extremely poor at, was avoiding issues in the first place.

2019-09-17

I attend a lot of online meetings nowadays, and I can’t tell you how often at meeting that starts at 10 AM actually ends up starting at 10:05 AM or 10:10 AM to cater for people who are running late. Right now I’m in yet another meeting that hasn’t started yet, as we’re just “giving it a few minutes for stragglers to join”.

Now it’s a different story if there is a specific person who really is needed in the meeting, and they’ve let you know they are running a few minutes late. But I see this as routine in pretty much every meeting I attend. Meetings almost never start at the correct time.

2019-09-10

I’ve been in the IT industry a long time. I see trends come and go. (Mostly they go). At this point, I think I’m an OK judge of what’s going to fly and what isn’t. (Far from perfect but OK).

One thing that always puzzles me though is the way the word Modern is used as a put-down for things that aren’t modern, as though it’s a synonym for the word Better.

2019-09-03

When I was doing some Snowflake training recently, one of the students in the class asked what utility they should use on Windows for splitting a large file into sections. They wanted to split files for better bulk loading performance, to be able to use all available threads.

On Linux systems, the split command works fine but the best that most people came up with on Windows was to use Powershell. That’s a fine answer for some people, but not for everyone.

2019-08-23

I might be a bit anal about this but I really dislike clutter all over my computer’s screen desktop. You’ll notice above that I keep it empty. If there’s something on my desktop, it’s something that I’m working on really briefly. If I need to do a presentation, I might have a single folder called Desktop that I’ll sweep anything on the actual desktop into.

There are two things that drive me crazy in terms of desktop clutter though:

2019-08-20

I’ve seen a lot of discussion lately about diversity and inclusion, and rightly so. It’s incredibly important. But there are two points that I want to draw attention to. The first is that language matters. And the second is that we shouldn’t be generalizing about people, based upon either their physical characteristics, or their race, religion, sexual preferences, etc.

Language that singles out people based on these things is regularly called out. But one that’s often missed is age.

2019-08-13

Over the years, I’ve been noticing which apps users love and which ones they don’t like, or even hate. And I’ve decided that one of the biggest indicators of this is about how well they tolerate mistakes by users.

Users tend to learn to use apps in three ways:

• They watch or read some instructional material (this is actually the least common)
• Someone else shows them how to use the app (this is really common)
• They just experiment with the app (this is actually the most common)

How well do your apps allow people to experiment?

2019-08-06

I don’t know if it’s an Australian “thing” but whenever I’m setting up new financial or government accounts, these organizations insist on actually sending things to our street address.

Given how rampant identity theft has become in many places, this is just not sensible.

[caption id=“attachment_5424” align=“alignnone” width=“538”] Awesome image by Mathyas Kurmann[/caption]

Take a look at letterboxes that people have on local streets, and please try to convince me how sending anything there, is in any way safer than sending it to a post office box.

2019-07-31