I finally have a blog....

....and it has been an experience getting here.

I have spent the last year asking myself - Do I even want to do a blog? 

Well, I am actually going to leave that discussion for another day. I have reasons for blogging. I have reasons for not blogging. Someday I will blog about them...

After I decided to have a REAL blog, my next decision was - Do I host my blog at work (I am a Microsoft employee) or do I host it on my own servers?

The upside to hosting it on work servers - I don't have to do much except....post. The downside being I don't have the control that I am freakish about having when it comes to my online life and computers. I suppose it only took me one post on the work hosted server to realize I wanted that control. Thus the reason for 3 posts in 8 months.

My final choice was - What will my blogging solution be? 

I haven't done any REAL coding since 1993 when I shut down my Apple //gs BBS (they have my last name wrong). So writing my own solution was not going to happen. So that left searching for a packaged solution. To be honest, I didn't spend a lot of time mulling it over. Microsoft runs their blogging solution on Telligent Systems - Community Server. I figured, if it scales well enough for MS it can scale for little old me.

And it is free.

So I pulled down the CS1.1 package, cannibalized one of my idle machines (Dual 1Ghz, 2 gigs RAM) slapped Windows 2003 + SP1 and SQL 2000 + SP4 on it and fought with CS for a couple of days. I had some pretty darn simple issues with the install which the people on the CS Forums helped me resolve. The Install docs for CS leave a little to be desired, but they are online in WiKi format so I may just go fix them myself.....

So here I am....a part of the blog-o-verse.

Now what....

Well....I am a technology presenter for Microsoft so I will be using this forum to let the world know where I will be and what technologies I will be talking about. I also do a lot of webcasts so look for that information here as well. One of the reasons I am blogging is to help develop some relationships with the ITPro community. So if you happen to have attended one of my live presentations, or even just a webcast, I would enjoy hearing your comments about those sessions.

Tell me what you liked.

Tell me what sucked. 

But most importantly - Tell me what you need from me and Microsoft. I am here to serve.

I will also just be babbling from time to time......about stuff.

Cheers....