As you know I’m looking for a new job. We are looking to stay in the Orlando area first simply because we are so well connected to friends and our church. However, we are open to relocate. Since my family is in the Greenville, SC area and much of Patricia s family is in the Washington, DC area, we are also looking from Atlanta up to DC for opportunities. We are East Coast people, but if we needed to move off the right-coast, then we wouldn t mind Denver or Seattle! We are not necessarily looking to stay in a non-profit or faith-based organization. In fact, we feel we should be entering the private sector. My typical cover letter says something like the following: My name is Rob Williams and I m an Internet Strategist and Online Interactive Specialist. I ve had several years of Internet marketing and online social interaction and have spent a lot of time training others in our global organization to learn how to be more effective by using the Internet well. I have a firm grasp on emerging media marketing techniques and social media. The way people access the web and communicate is changing. Google is ready to change the rules once again and social media interaction is on the rise. I know how to use these tools to stay ahead of the curve and accomplish organizational goals effectively. Please contact me at the address and phone number below. I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, you can download the freshest copy of my resume at robwilliams.emurse.com or connect with me on LinkedIN at www.linkedin.com/in/orangejack. Thank you for your consideration. As for Patricia, we are hoping that we will be in a position to allow her to focus on healing and do some freelance graphic design. If you felt so lead, we d appreciate any referrals, recommendations, or leads on any new roles for us. If so, please contact us, connect on LinkedIN, and/or send them to my resume. Below are links to my resume in various formats available for download, a link to my LinkedIN profile, and my new contact information. #emurse_resume_badge_gogomonkey a {color: #3672a4;}#emurse_resume_badge_gogomonkey a:hover {color: #113249;}#emurse_resume_badge_gogomonkey td,#emurse_resume_badge_gogomonkey th { padding: 4px !important; } My Resume Web DOC PDF RTF ODT TXT
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

On Building an Online Business
Sherry Borzo of DSM Buzz is the host of an interview podcast show called Entrepreneur People, on BlogTalkRadio.com. She broadcasts from Des Moines, Iowa in the American Midwest. Sherry graciously asked me to be on her show as a guest earlier this week. She is the nicest person — you can just feel her warmth and friendliness through the audio. She made me feel at ease instantly, the mark of a good interviewer. Sherry wanted to talk about some of my experiences building this online business called Small Business Trends. Please tune in and support Sherry’s show, as we discuss such points as: Strategy for building an online business while you consult or freelance on the side: Yes, it is a lot of work because you’re essentially holding down two jobs. But if you are bootstrapping a business startup, farming out your services is one of the best ways to get funding. You fund your fledgling business from the money you make in freelancing or consulting. Take your earnings from being a freelancer and plow them into the business, dollar by dollar, month by month. Invest in marketing, a better site design, content creation, and improved site features, as you bring in more money. We all have something we can offer as a freelancer or as a service provider if we look hard enough — writing, software programming, project management, graphics design, consulting. Find whatever that is. Do that while you build your business in the evenings and on weekends using the money you earn from freelancing. Don’t give up too soon as an entrepreneur: It takes most people at least a year, sometimes two, to make meaningful money from an advertising-based site. There is a ramp-up period while you build a brand, get pages indexed in the search engines, and build enough traffic to generate meaningful advertising income. If you’re bootstrapping it tends to take more time, because you never have enough money to do things as soon as you’d like. Many entrepreneurs underestimate the time and give up too soon. (Remember that what you see here today on Small Business Trends is the result of 4 years.) Your job as an entrepreneur is to find alternate earnings so that you can stick with it! There is much much more, too. Listen to the entire podcast — it’s a little under 30 minutes. You can click the red and yellow arrow below to hear it. PS, a little trivia: I was speaking from my hotel room in San Diego. If you listen closely you can hear housekeeping rapping on the door in the background.
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Quit Your Day Job: Bodies Of Water
Unless you were born with one of those silver spoons, you likely work a day job, sneaking time for your own business when not taking care of someone else’s. You’re not alone. Every week, Brandon Stosuy finds out how our favorite indie artists make ends meet…Bodies Of Water’s spiraling, gospel-tinged gold sounds have been in heavy rotation around here for a few months. From “It Is Familiar” and “These Are the Eyes” (posted here), through the summery Take-Away versions of “I Heard It Sound” and “I Guess I’ll Forget the Sound, I Guess, I Guess” (there), and now “Doves Circled The Sky” (after our conversations), we’ve managed to pack just about a half of the Los Angeles quartet’s superbly orchestral, made-for-the-small-town-stage Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink onto the site. That’s not counting their killer cover of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” You get the idea: We dig.So when I approached band member David Metcalf about his employment status, I was happy — in a bittersweet way — to find out out that 3/4 of the band hold day jobs they’re willing to talk to us about: Metcalf does design and illustration, Kyle Gladden designs for a clothing company, and Jessica Conklin teaches. Learn a bit about sassy sweatpants, weekly field trips, and Ziggy, the graphic designing singer of a rap metal band after the jump.
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Current.tv: a Network with Style Part 2 of 2
Brand encompasses so much more than just a logo, it involves the entire experience a user/consumer has with a product. Current.tv has built a brand upon a foundation of engaging user-generated content that is beautifully complimented with unique motion graphics . The fantastic thing about web 2.0 is that it engages the user in a conversation or interaction. This trend has been closely associated with a design style that exploits specific visual elements such as diagonal striped backgrounds, reflections and, “ajax-enhanced” flowing motion. By adopting this web 2.0 “look” that is so closely associated with the web Current.tv is making the bridge visually between web based interaction and broadcast television. Rather than just thinking of Current.tv as a network the viewer subconsciously blurs the lines between the two media types making the cable TV station an extension of the web conversation. According to MographWiki.net Current.tv’s logo was created by MetaDesign, a studio founded by Erik Spiekerman. Spiekerman is well known for his stunning sanserif typeface FF Meta which I had the lovely production experience of implementing in parking garages at my first design studio job out of college. You never forget your first big design project, even if it is just for a parking garage. Meta Design did all the branding for the Adobe Creative Suite which you also may be familiar with. In an article on BoardsMag.com from 2005 Logan, a motion graphics studio was tasked with coming up with the initial “animated on-air toolkit including lower thirds, logo bumpers and 15 animated show packages, including logo design for each (pod)”. When Googling Logan I found a very simple site that showcased their portfolio and clients with very little explanation. I mean…who needs body copy when you have work like this? Since their initial launch Current.tv has continued to produce fantastic motion graphics through their in-house design team. Current.tv has a strong, consistent brand that clearly communicates that they are about the innovation of user generated content on the web and on television. Even if you aren’t a fan of the format, Al Gore, or user-generated content, many designers can appreciate current.tv’s stunning graphics. To view current.tv’s motion graphics reel click here or visit MographWiki.net. Technorati Tags: current.tv, metadesign, user-generated content, user-generated television, internet video, FF Meta, Erik Spiekerman, Adobe Creative Suite Branding, Web 2.0 Design, Web 2.0, motiongraphics
Source: feeds.feedburner.com

A SQL Profiler trace Swiss Army Knife
Have you ever needed to find your most expensive queries and quickly grew weary of writing T-SQL against trace tables to try to ferret them out?  Have you ever had to wade through gigabytes of trace data just to find one ill-behaving query?  Have you ever struggled to decide what performance metrics really matter when analyzing Profiler traces:  duration, reads, writes, etc?  Today s post is about a new tool Bart and I wrote to help you do all this and more.   Origins   The original concept behind Retrace was to create a simple tool to load a SQL Server Profiler trace file into a database ala the Relog tool that ships with Windows (and provides similar functionality for Perfmon logs).  Retrace would re-trace a session of SQL Server activity as a server-side trace table.  I often needed to query trace files using T-SQL and didn t like resorting to fn_trace_gettable every time, so Retrace was born to automate that process for me.  That was the original idea.   Of course, these kinds of things tend to take on a life of their own, and Retrace soon began to demand that I enhance it in all sorts of interesting ways.  Around this same time, my friends in CSS got underway with getting the SQL Nexus performance analysis platform that Bart and I built released via CodePlex.  (Great news:  it s out there now.  More on that later.)  One of the cooler features we built for Nexus was a facility we called TraceBuster.   Nexus supports this notion of generic diagnostic data loaders that implement a common interface.  Nexus interacts with these assemblies via this generic interface, and users can build their own loader assemblies so long as they adhere to the interface we expose.  TraceBuster is a Nexus loader we built to process SQL Profiler trace files and load them into a data warehouse.  It automatically parameterizes the queries it reads from each trace such that the performance of a query executed with different parameter sets can be tracked over time.  Unlike SQL Profiler itself, TraceBuster is able to identify and aggregate performance statistics such as CPU use, duration, reads, writes, etc., for these query templates rather than treating multiple instances of the same query with different parameters as different queries.  Lightweight, fast, and extremely simple from a coding standpoint, it does exactly what we wanted it to do and no more.    For a number of reasons, it was decided that TraceBuster would not be included in the CodePlex release of Nexus (though you can still get it here in binary form).  That got Bart and I to thinking.  How cool would it be if Retrace used TraceBuster and basically provided a nice command line tool to load SQL Profiler traces into a data warehouse?  What if Retrace was merely a thin console app shell over the TraceBuster assembly originally designed for Nexus?  Since Nexus interacted with TraceBuster and its other diagnostic loaders generically, there was no reason a small console app couldn t do the same thing without requiring Nexus itself to be on the box.  Rather than merely load the trace into a trace table on the server, what if we let TraceBuster do all of its cool aggregation and analysis for us, thus saving all kinds of work manually querying the trace files?  And what if on top of that we used the client-side Reporting Services reports that Bart developed for TraceBuster s data warehouse and had Retrace display them?  Then we d have a single tool that could blaze through our trace data, load it into a data warehouse for further perusal, and finally display useful reports over that data.  How cool would that be?!   So, we spent a couple late nights and a weekend here or there and morphed Retrace into a Swiss Army Knife for Profiler traces.  One of the things I found myself often doing in my tuning work within SQL Server development was running a SQLDiag collection immediately before doing something I wanted to measure on the server, then loading the Profiler traces it collected via Retrace.  Given Retrace s one-stop-shopping nature, I thought it made sense to build that functionality into Retrace, so I added a command line option to Retrace to allow it to call SQLDiag automatically before a load operation.    When it was all said and done, Retrace knew how to collect Profiler traces, to load those traces into a performance warehouse on the server, and to run reports over that warehouse.  I had a simple little console app that automated many of the tasks I found myself doing over and over as I tuned this or that component in my day job.   Summary   Retrace knows how to do three basic things:   Collect a SQL Profiler trace (using the SQLDiag utility that ships with SQL Server 2005 and later) Load Profiler traces into a data warehouse that resides in a SQL Server database.  These can be traces it collects via SQLDiag or traces from other sources (e.g., SQL Profiler) Show reports listing the top N most expensive queries from the trace files loaded into the warehouse   Examples   To load a trace file into a data warehouse on the default SQL Server instance using Windows authentication:  retrace -i mytrace.trc   To load a trace file into a data warehouse and display the GUI (Reporting Services-based) reports: retrace -i mytrace.trc -r   To load a trace file into a data warehouse and display the top N queries report in HTML format: retrace -i mytrace.trc -f html -r   To start a Profiler trace collection, then load the collected trace file(s) into a data warehouse: retrace -c TRACE    To start a Profiler trace collection, load the collected trace file(s) into a data warehouse, and then display the GUI reports: retrace -c TRACE -r   To load all trace files in a given folder into a data warehouse and display the GUI reports: retrace -i myfolder\*.trc -r   To load a trace file into a data warehouse and write the top N queries report to an XML file: retrace -i mytrace.trc -f xml_full -o myreport.xml   To display the GUI reports (following a previous load of trace data into the warehouse): retrace -r   To load a trace file into a database other than [retrace] or to a non-default SQL Server instance: retrace -d mydatabase -S myserver\myinstance -i mytrace.trc   As you can see, you can load one or more trace files from the command line.  These can be ones you instructed the tool to collect via SQLDiag or ones you ve collected through other means (e.g., SQL Profiler).  You can then display reports showing the top N most expensive queries in a variety of formats (HTML, XML, PDF, Excel, JPEG, etc.)  The default report format is a simple GUI report that makes use of client-side Reporting Services report files (you don t need Reporting Services itself).    Customizing Retrace   You can customize Retrace s output in a variety of ways.  You can customize the RDLC files that make up the reports shown in the Retrace GUI if you like.  And you can also modify the XML stylesheet (XSL file) that Retrace uses to translate its XML output into HTML when HTML output format is selected.  This stylesheet is named retrace.xsl and resides in the XML subfolder.  Here s what the HTML output looks like:     You can customize the T-SQL script Retrace uses to create its data warehouse and reporting stored procedures by modifying the TraceAnalysis.sql script file in the Scripts subfolder.  Be careful here, however, as modifying the objects in this script may prevent Retrace from being able to display meaningful analysis reports.   You can also customize the Retrace application itself.  Retrace is a ScriptIt application.  For those who don t know what ScriptIt is, it s a technology developed internally within Microsoft that allows you much of the flexibility you have with scripting tools such as Perl and VBScript with managed code applications.  It combines the ease of deployment and quick modification you see in traditional scripting tools with being able to develop in your favorite managed code language.  It takes advantage of the fact that every machine that has the .NET Framework 2.0 or later installed also has the full MSBuild environment (the toolset used by Visual Studio to compile and build application binaries).  Using ScriptIt, you can modify the source of a managed code application, rebuild it, and redeploy using only the executable you don t need to store the source in separate files or keep track of solutions and projects in Visual Studio.  You can edit your apps in Notepad if you like, then rebuild them on the spot without need of any other tools.  The current plan is for ScriptIt to be released to the public next year, and you can contact Vance Morrison, its author, if you have any questions about it.  Once ScriptIt is released, you ll be able to edit Retrace s source code and make whatever changes you need without resorting to full-blown application development.   SQL Nexus   I mentioned earlier that SQL Nexus has been released on CodePlex.  This means that you can download the current binaries and source code today and extend/use Nexus in your own work.  Read the license agreement over there for details.  We will continue to keep a binary version of TraceBuster available here in case you d like to use it with Nexus.  If you get Nexus, you have a much more graphical, full-featured performance analysis tool than Retrace was intended to be.  That said, if you like simple, fast command-line tools, you may find Retrace useful.  I wrote a good chunk of both tools, and I think each has its place.   Conclusion   They say necessity is the mother of invention, and I guess necessity is just as responsible for Retrace as are Bart and I.  Retrace was a tool we needed to do our jobs.  It evolved into its current form through the necessity of our both needing a Swiss Army Knife-type Profiler trace tool and our belief that TraceBuster provided useful functionality that we should continue to leverage in our work on the product.  Download it, take it out for a spin, and let us know what you think.  
Source: blogs.msdn.com

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