It seems a very brief two weeks ago that I was in the middle of the team running SQL Saturday Exeter as that was right before my final week at my old job. I gave a session there on Event Notifications that was possibly the most action packed I have ever been involved in.

To start with my presentation refused to accept input from my remote control.This was no real problem as my session wasn’t one that needed me to be very mobile. About 5 slides in however and PowerPoint refused to recognise keyboard inputs too. This was more critical, I was contemplating a reboot of the laptop when PowerPoint made a last gasp move and the application crashed totally. This made it easier, restarting the application is quicker than restarting the whole laptop. While all this is going on there is a scream from the front row of the audience and I see my wife standing up and looking rather flustered. I had to carry on and finish the presentation before I found out the details that Annette was in the process of trying to take a photo of my session and placed her mug of tea between her knees to allow her to control the camera. She fumbled the mug move and tipped its entire contents all over her legs – hence the scream and standing up!

So, a week later …. I fly from Exeter to Amsterdam and then drive across The Netherlands and into Germany to start my new job. The following week was a massive learning curve of servers, networks, people, oh and a new language to start learning! I hope that my new colleagues will continue to be patient with me while I mangle their mother tongue. Listening (and trying to remember) is tiring work!

I have two more weeks in Germany and then I am heading back to the UK to set up my home office but on the way back it is by great chance I am travelling on the day of SQL Saturday Holland (April 6th) and I am lucky to have been picked as as speaker so will be giving a session there as well as meeting up with many friends. There are some excellent sessions on the schedule and I am personally hoping for a drama free hour while I tell people about Extended Events! It would be great if you can come along and say hello, or guten tag, or goedendag.