I made this SSIS package a while back, and thought it was awesome at the time…

Yeeeaah… Not so much.

Recently in the IT blogosphere, there’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing, especially in connection with Microsoft’s new initiative Azure.  The announcement of SQL Server available in the cloud has caused some turmoil in my field of database administration. SQL Data Services will offset the responsibility of hosting, installing, configuring, and otherwise administrating the server as we are akin to. I have mostly avoided all the DBA rants regarding the prospect of loosing jobs to the SDS cloud, for the reason that is succinctly explained in the excerpt below.

Why do I think things will be fine? Because data is King. And those that know how to move data, and get data to the right people, in the right way, at the right time, will always have a job. So, maybe having your database servers in the cloud means we do not have to worry about backups, tape storage, etc. Fine, I don’t care about that piece of being a DBA anyway. But you are still going to need someone that understands the tools involved in making your systems and processes work efficiently and correctly.

The full article, found over at BaconBitsAndBytes.com, is a witty (and potentially NSFW/offensive) article by a smart DBA and I highly recommend following the advice.

this makes you a little sick…

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

That “sizzling” has always driven me nuts in the lower quality stuff.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn’t. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records — the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

I can’t totally subscribe to this hypothesis. Because vinyl records are analog, they play a continuous audio wave that includes a bit of warm fuzz and crackle. Whereas digital audio is a mashup of samples from the audio wave; the sizzle and hiss created from the gaps between the samples. You may get a little noise with vinyl, but at least cymbals will sound like they do in real life.

(via: Daring Fireball)