I admit that I'm not on the cutting edge of technology. Sure, I follow the news to see what's out there, but I can't afford to be an early adopter, either in terms of coin or in terms of time. Plus, I'm a pretty conservative guy when money's involved, and I REALLY don't want to end up being that guy who sunk all his money into the Betamax only to watch as VHS became the videotape format of choice. So, whenever I see new technology, I always fight the initial excitement and buzz and focus on the reasons why it really won't amount to anything.
With that setup out of the way, I've been using for about 3 months now. I joined, at first, to follow a friend who was giving up posting on LiveJournal and going strictly to Twitter. He then didn't post very much, and so my twitter account pretty much languished for about a month. Sure, I'd read the high profile case that credited Twitter as being the chief tool helping an Egyptian student get out of prison, but that did little to change my first impression that twitter was chiefly for tweens and teens with way too much free time on their hands or for people living in foreign, dangerous lands.
And then there was texting. I had been aware of texting for a long time, but in this case it was a technology that had three strikes against it. First, my initial exposure to it was when there weren't really any bulk plans and it cost money for every message I sent and received. Second, my phone really sucked for it. I really struggled with texting on the standard phone keypad. God forbid I have to type two S's in a row....press press press press....wait.....press press press press. It drove me nuts. And finally, like Twitter, there were the tweens/teens as the primary practitioners.
At this time I feel it only fair that I declare, loudly and unequivocally, that I bear no malice towards young people. I remember being one not too long ago. I just can't help but sometimes feel intensely jealous of the free time they have. In a horror movie when the mentor figure describes the origins of some undead creature to his young charges he always ends up saying, in one way or another, something about how they hate the living because it reminds them of what they have lost. I'd like to stress again that I don't hate young people.
In the months leading up to the SQL Pass convention, while googling the problem-of-the-day at work, I stumbled across this blog post by Jason Massie, which in turn led me to follow not only the links he referenced in that post, but to also look at more of the posts he had on social networking. And because of blog posts by folks like Jason and Brent Ozar, I stopped looking at social networking as just a waste of time, and started to see the potential benefit it could give both to me in my professional development, and to my employer in my daily job. So, I followed their instructions and started following a bunch of people they followed. The benefits were not immediate, and, I must admit, that first week I started to doubt that Twitter was all they made it out to be.
One day I had a question, my google-fu failed me, and I couldn't seem to find an answer. I asked on Twitter. No one answered. A day or two later I asked another question...crickets. Well, by gum, I was determined to get some value out of twitter so I started doing a Ho-Chunk word-of-the-day... and I lost a few followers.
And then one day I saw someone post a link to an article regarding some topic that had been bothering me a month back. And then someone else posted a link to a blog post talking about a problem that I was having THAT VERY SAME DAY. And shortly after that I saw someone else talking about the upcoming SQL Pass convention, JUST as I was planning MY PASS trip. I asked a question. Someone answered me! Was Twitter becoming psychic? Did it KNOW I was thinking about throwing it away and it decided to show me its value? So, I stuck with it.
And then I went to the convention. I'm not the most extroverted guy, and one of the things I worried about for the upcoming convention was that I wouldn't be able to take advantage of the great networking potential the convention would afford me. How would I meet people? How many awkward conversations would I have to have before I met folks I'd want to talk to; people who would have similar technology or work problems as me? How would I break the ice?
Well, Twitter was a big help with that. By following people on Twitter, I had an insight into who they were, what they liked, and in which areas of SQL Server they might be experts, and I had this info even before I went to the convention. Also, these folks were using Twitter to coordinate their activities at PASS, commenting on what sessions they were going to attend, hinting at good presentators, or just letting folks know where there were. Once I knew where they were, I could walk up to them and say 'Hi, so-and-so, I follow you on twitter and I liked what you said the other day.....'. Yeah, it kinda felt like stalking in a certain sense, but it gave me the courage to go up and talk to people who possess some pretty formidable grey matter.
I came back from PASS energized, and excited. I received an intense education in a short amount of time, I met some pretty great people AND I had alot of fun. And, so I started to re-evaluate alot of technologies I had taken a look at and dismissed because I didn't think they'd help me at all. I started learning PowerShell, and a script I had written while learning just today saved me hours of manually checking the status of our SQL Servers after we had a power failure in our server room. I started a technical blog, which Andy Leonard, in a conversation at PASS, had suggested to me with the simple phrase 'If you think, blog'.
Which brings me to Brent Ozar and the phone. One day Brent tweeted, extolling the virtues of some online app named Remember The Milk. I gave it a look, and I started to think seriously about how something like that might improve my life instead of instantly dismissing it as another bauble and time waster of the internet. My wife will tell you that I often forget things, like being sure to leave work at a certain time because I promised to watch our daughter so she could go do something fun (Bad me!) RTM seemed like a great tool for sending myself reminders, especially since I check my email a couple times a day. But what about when I'm not checking my email? It can text reminders to your phone too! But, darn it, my phone sucks for texting. Guess what? They've got phone with QWERTY keyboards! So, last night, as our joint Christmas present to ourselves, my wife and I went out and bought Pantech Matrix phones and a texting plan to go with it. We've been able to rescue photos from our old phones with ease, and we're able to communicate important things to each other without the urgency of having to take a phone call. Plus, just having the phone made me realize I could email a text to my boss's phone so that I could get her out of a meeting for something important, but again, without the urgency or insistence of a phone call.
I'm excited about the possibilities new and old innovations like texting, twitter, RTM, and PowerShell have in store for me. Dare I say it? I might actually like IT again.