Spend a month with me on my deserted island

I was tagged by Grant Fritchey for this latest viral quiz.

I welcome him to come visit my current home state anytime. I've been having so much fun at work lately and trying to play when not at work, that I just barely got to answering the quiz.


Here are the Quiz details

“So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work. Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it; we’ll call it a virtual deserted island. Perhaps what I should simply ask is if you had a month without any walk-up work, no projects due, no performance issues that require you to devote time from anything other than a wishlist of items you’ve been wanting to get accomplished at work but keep getting pulled away from I ask this question: what would be the top items that would get your attention?”

This is an interesting little question. What would I do if I could do whatever I want? Let's assume that I have a brain lapse and do not take any of this time to enjoy the island i'm on. Nor do I decide to spend any time with my family, as I assume that I am alone here. for some reason, all that I want to do is work. Now that we are in the correct frame of mind, let's proceed.

One of the things that I want to do more of is write. It's why I blog, but I often don't take enough time to blog/article/so on. Given time, I'd like to spend more time doing this task. However, I know I would not be able to spend the entire month doing this. Let's say that I would carve out some needed time to do this task.

When the "fit hits the shan", I have often felt unprepared with my scripts and tools to dig into the source of the problems. I have built quite an arsenal of favorite scripts that assist me in this endeavor. But I do find myself adapting them to situations on occasion. I would like to spend some time cleaning up these scripts, making some more, even making some other tools/apps/and so on. Prepping these items, documenting them, practicing with them, are all valuable ways to spend my time.

We use a third party replication tool called GoldenGate. I have dealt with this tech a lot, but not on a very deep level yet. I would love to spend quite a bit of time digging into the tool. Making some new tools that interfaced with it, to gather specific statuses, perform pre-determined tasks. There are ways that I would like to make our jobs easier when we deal with this tech that we currently do not have. Spending time with this task would ensure that I have more time in the future.

Learning new things. I would love to learn some new things that I simply have not gotten under my belt yet. Powershell. DMV's. New features of 2008. Performance monitoring. Basically, all the things I dont know yet. This list is pretty massive, so I should simply take it one item at a time, and get one under my belt as it comes along.

The list above is obviously an odd one, with distinct items that have little cross-over. I would spend a bit of time on each. In reality, I should apply percentages to each, and be anal about how much time I do spend on each, to maximize my effectiveness. Or maybe, each day, i'll simply work on whichever one I want. after all, its my list, my priorities and my desert island.


I will tag the following fine folks to continue on with this viral storyline.

Andy Leonard (@AndyLeonard)
Chris Shaw (@SQLShaw)
Pat Wright (@SqlAsylum)