I am grateful and thankful I got selected to speak again at Speaker Idol. It has been a crazy and fun year since I last blogged. Hard to believe a year has passed!

The short version? I ditched my Apple iPhone 6 and went to the dark side (Android) and got a Samsung S6 Edge Plus. Why? Because I wanted to get a GearVR. Had to wait until after Christmas but I got it and then disappeared into VR with my mobile headset. Ordered an Oculus Rift in January and had to wait till June until I got it. In the meantime, upgraded to Windows 10 and also upgraded my PC gaming rig to Oculus Rift specs. Played in VR with my old Oculus DK2, then finally, with my new Rift. OMG I wish I could write what it is like. As I have said before, it’s like tasting an orange. If you have never tasted an orange, you just can’t describe it with words. You have to experience it.

Anyway, in some of my spare time (!) I have looked at a lot of VR apps, attended many VR Meetups in the Denver area, and learned more and more about Unreal Engine 4.

In other news, I became President of the Denver SQL Server User Group and took over in January. Let me say, running a User Group is hard. I had no idea what it really takes until I was on the hot seat. And this is after I had also been on the board as VP of Membership and VP of Marketing!

Having to cancel SQL Saturday in Denver in September was a punch in the gut for me. It was my fault I did not read the fine print about ALL of the things I should have learned about. In the midst of selecting a facility, I was informed that we were under four months out and would have to cancel/punt. Argh. I had no idea. Later, I found out this hard requirement had blindsided other groups too. At this point, it is looking like September 2017 for Denver and some other smaller events in 2017, trying to better coordinate with the other User Groups in Colorado, both Boulder and Colorado Springs. So we are not going to have just one big event but one modest event and lots of other smaller events too.

Work wise, I started a new job just before last PASS as the lone production database administrator (DBA) for an e-mail archive system. It gets about 80-90% inserts and 10-20% selects. One system is 7TB in size and the other is 25TB in size. SQL2012 and SQL2008. Simple things take way longer than you think it should. Good times.

Good news is that upper management passed on upgrading to SQL2014 a bit ago so now we are looking at upgrading both systems to SQL2016. Yay! So this PASS I will be soaking up as much SQL2016 goodness as I can.

Also decided to pursue the new Professional Degree by Microsoft in Data Science, slowly but surely. So my current career plan is DBA -> Data Scientist (in cybersecurity) -> Neuroscientist. Yes, I want to go back to school after the kids sometime and study the brain, the last great frontier. And use all of the greatness of Azure, GPU acceleration, Data Science and VR to study the brain.

Watching the Denver Broncos struggle to play right now, so gotta go

Hope to see and connect with everyone at PASS! More later…

–Todd