My first blog posts
Today, Denis Gobo (@DenisGobo) tagged me in Meme Monday. The topic: what is the first blog post you wrote, and when did you write it?
I have two answers.
My first personal blog post
I started blogging at aaronbertrand.com on October 27, 2002. My first post was just a basic intro, describing what I planned to do on the site – belittle people and share photos.
This is my grandmother, who passed away in February.
She is, and will always be, missed quite dearly. This picture was taken at about 5:30 PM in 1997: the year I squeaked by with a degree, and moved from Ontario to Rhode Island. My only regret is not visiting more often while she was still with us, or that I was in such a rush to leave Canada in the first place.
I apologize. There are happier pictures to the left, kids. Some pages have captions, some don’t. It’s been hell enough to finally put all of these online; if you can’t figure out why a picture is funny, that the structure it depicts is the CN Tower, or what shade of orange that particular sunset is dominated by, I don’t think a caption would help you too much anyway.
In addition, I’m really sorry if you use a small monitor and can’t see all of the captions on larger pages but, well, I didn’t choose your monitor; you did. And if you use Netscape or some other piece of crap and have problems with these pages, well, I didn’t choose your browser, either.
I may get around to publishing rants here at some point. Occasionally I say some funny things, or so I’m led to believe, and if I can add a bit of humor to your day (because I know I’ve had days like the one you’re having), I’m more than willing to do so. Usually these will be about driving experiences and run-ins with incredibly stupid or shallow people. I’d love to write about the fabulous interactions I have at work some days; however, some of my co-workers know of this site, and if word got around what I think of John or Jane Doe…
In any case, stay tuned. I’m not going to promise you a delivery date, but at the very least, you can come back every once in a while and browse the photographs.
I like to think that I’ve mellowed out a little bit since then, and I did continue sharing photos there until mid-2008 – after which I found that facebook was much easier. Unfortunately, I don’t have a straightforward way to re-publish all of the photos in a new location, but you can still get to them via this page.
My first sqlblog.com blog post
I was invited to participate on the sqlblog.com site at the end of 2006. This was shortly after I had sold aspfaq.com, where I didn’t blog about SQL Server per se, but I did write a lot of answers to frequently asked questions. The original intro blog post is here, but I will reproduce below for completeness:
You may or may not know that I was the primary author over at aspfaq.com. Earlier in 2006, I allowed another entity to take on the web site and incorporate it into their grander scheme of IT resource sites. Unfortunately, their transition has been a little slower than I expected.
Their content management system has either been broken or off-limits at various times since then. I have sent them bug reports and minor updates to several articles, but so far, these have been low on the list. I want to ensure that you all understand that I have faith in the new owners, and that they will pick up the slack once they get all their content management systems aligned.
In the meantime, I will be posting topics of interest to me here, as well as addendums to articles over at aspfaq. I have promised them that I will continue to promote the site and publish content, so don’t be surprised if something you see here suddenly becomes an article over there.
My first post with any substance will follow shortly; I have kept a running log of SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 builds and hotfixes that have been released since about mid-September.
As of today I have written 496 blog posts on sqlblog.com. I had no idea I was about to reach a significant milestone; I’ll have to do something special for post #500.