This month’s Meme15 assignment and the first was chosen by Jason Strate (Blog|Twitter) he posed the assignment of writing about why do I blog and why I started.

I started blogging back in 2003 just about a one year after launching Gogorichie.com, back then it was the social network of its time along with AIM and YIM. As me and my high school friends went off to college we stayed in contact via our blogs. You know this topic made me go back to the very beginning and read my very first blog posting. It brought up memories of living in LA and the good times I had out there. Wait most of those post were written after coming home from a night out so a lot of the postings were run but all fun.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is from Allen White. He posed the question of what is my favorite little SQL trick. I can’t wait to see what tips the #SQLFamily write about. I discovered one of my favorite tricks last year, just a little background my first SQL version I started out administrating and developing on 8 years ago was SQL 2000 back then to get table statistics was no easy task. These days you just need to right-click on the database and go the reports to get much of the information you’ll need about a database. I started using SQL 2008 last year so when I when wrote a blog post about this little trick I came across online on how to quickly pull the table size information it had been one of my favorite tricks then. Since I’m still dealing with data in SQL 2000 server production environment still this trick still comes in handy. Thanks to the posting by Mitchel Sellers on How to Determine Table Size it’s become quick and easy to get the information I need about my databases.

I saw this topic a few weeks back on @sqlrockstar’s site but never got around to writing a post.

I’ve been in working on databases for about 6 years now a mixture of Access, SQL, Teradata, and MySQL. So when I saw the topic thoughts began to flow through my brain. What does the SQL Family mean to me?? it means that there is a network of people with the same interest, challenged by the same problems as me. Now with my discovery of twitter, hence the hashtag I’ve been able to discovered the family and discovered local events such as the user groups in Chicago and SQL Saturday’s events and many others including a yearly cruise. Now when i need help with programming question I can turn to the #sqlfamily, the people are so cool that when its someone’s birthday or other special occasion they get acknowledged by the #sqlfamily or even a sad event the family member off words of comfort.

Great News Everyone, I talked to Anthony Colletti today via email. He’s in Brussels Belgium at the JCI World Congress and said that were *#3 in the
WORLD* for JCI organizations in raising money for Nothing But Nets !!!!! just think how much more we can achieve by the end of the year. For every $10 we raise we save a life from Malaria donate at http://bit.ly/ut25Oh

Richard Lewis
2011 Website Program Manager – United States Jaycees
2011 National Prog/ Govt. Involvement State Chair – Illinois Jaycees

What an awesome GA we had this past weekend!!! Saturday during Lunch Anthony Colletti spoke about how close we are the our 2011 Nothing But Nets goal and our chapters STEPPED UP big time…to the tune of $1051.00 in pledges and donations. A big thanks goes out to all those chapters Mount Prospect, Gurnee/Lindenhurst, Bolingbrook, Chatham, Woodstock, Lombard, and Woodridge. Once we receive all the checks we will be only $289 away from our goal !!! please consider making a donation of 10 bucks to our State Nothing But Nets Site.

Last friday was exciting I announced my candidacy for 2012 Area One Vice President of the Illinois Jaycees. I believe that we can grow our area with outstanding Training held locally, We can use the Knowledge of our members and our networks to strengthen our area, and We can retain our members through all the Opportunities our organization have to offer. Like my page on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Voteforrichard and follow my campaign. Since our organizations election is less then two weeks away I’m visiting 14 chapters in 13 days with a three day vacation in the middle of my campaign. I want to get out and hear from our members what are their concerns across the Area chapters in the Fox Valley may have different concerns then chapters in the Northeast or Northwest.