I sit here in a hotel room as I reminisce on this past weekend.  This last weekend began with a red-eye trip from Salt Lake to New York.  The reason for taking that trip was merely to attend SQLInspire – oh and to support the community.

This event was organized by a friend and some of his friends (whom I got to finally meet this weekend).  That friend is Robert Pearl.  Some of his friends (until now were my online acquaintances) include Mike Coles, Brian Moran, Andy Leonard, Melissa Demsak and Matt Velic.  I also had the chance to meet Tom LaRock and re-meet Steve Jones.

The premise of the event is to Inspire Database professionals to continue in the field or improve in the field in some way.  Due to that premise, there was very little tech talk.  Which is probably a good thing because I was having a hard enough time staying awake .

I could talk about all of the talks, but I want to recap just one of the talks and then discuss something entirely different for a bit.

The one talk that I found really moving was by Tom LaRock (whose daughter bears the same name as my oldest daughter).  His talk was titled “Someday.”  And for most of the talk you could see me  largely agreeing to what he was saying.  In short, there are “Somedays” that are more important than others.  Don’t be too caught up to let those pass you by.  A “Someday” with your children is far more important than that email you are sending.  Don’t get too caught up that you are passing by what you value most and where you would like to be (re: goals).  The smart alek in me really wanted to ask him during Q&A how to get on his blogroll.  Purely because of a comment he made on his last Rankings update about James Serra (Oct 3, 2011).

Outside of the speeches, there was another thing that was both entertaining and inspirational.  Despite the best efforts of the organizers, it seemed that Halloweem, NYC or something was conspiring against them to make things go awry.  From a computer glitch that caused the attendee list to disappear from the security system, to late arriving donuts, to white-screens raising and lowering throughout Bobby Tables’ presentation and little things like that; it seemed the event was destined for problems.

Not missing a beat though, those issues just kept getting corrected (it’s what DBAs do anyway).  Had I known about this dude though – I might have avoided the event.  OK, I would have just avoided visiting Times Square after 5PM.

Last words:  This event was also to help people network.  Networking time was built into the schedule.  Very good move Robert, Brian, Andy and Gang!!