I agonized for a while with what to do for the first sentence for my attempt to re-enter the blogging community and finally deciding to wimp out and write about the opening sentence instead. Goal #1: Completed!

As I said, this is technically the second blog that I’ve run. The first one I started a number of years ago, with no firm goal in mind—I was just going to mumble about whatever was going on or whatever I felt like talking about. I didn’t do too bad getting things written, but since it was somewhat lacking a purpose in life, I got a little bored with it. This time around, I’m going to focus on writing technical content, as it should help me to learn more about the things that I do every day. Of course, there’s also the part about how all of the cool kids in #sqlhelp are doing it.

I had been kicking around the thought of doing this for a while, and actually it was Mike Reigler’s first post about SQL Cruise that finally pushed me over the edge. Reading his awesome post about the cruise and how he decided it was worthwhile to go for whatever reason finally made me decide that I wanted to do it, too. I’m in no way, shape, or form a good writer, so I don’t know how well this will go over, but I’m going to subject you guys to it, anyway (at least until you decide this is lame).

My goal here at the beginning is to get a post up once a week. It’s not very much, but since I don’t do a lot of crazy stuff at work, I will be doing good if I can pull that off. Who knows, maybe I’ll start to get a bunch of cool stuff going on and I’ll be able to pound stuff out all the time. I hope that I can keep it technical and useful enough to live up to the high standards of SQL bloggers 🙂

The <BOOM> Thing…

This is going to be one of those long crazy stories that I have that will only make sense to me and nobody will read all of. It’s OK, I understand.

The Boom… I used to eat, breathe, and sleep aerospace-related stuff. Until I was in middle school, I wanted to be an Astronaut. This means that I would watch every space- and flying-related show that PBS would put on (<insert shout out to WTTW here>).

Somewhere along the line there was an episode of something that covered the X-15. One of the things included was the time that one of the test airframes blew up on Scott Crossfield during a static engine test. The way I remember it going down, was the engine flamed out, someone said “restart” over the radio, and immediately after that, it exploded. For as long as I can remember, whenever someone says “restart”, my brain fills in an explosion right afterwards. Sometimes this is funny, other times, not so much.

That’s where the <BOOM> is from.

While thinking about putting this story down on paper, I realized that due to the awesomeness of the Internet, there might be some tape of this incident on YouTube. Guess what? There is! Awesome right? Run it up to the one minute mark for the juicy bit:

(link if embed fails: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXpEPZ6ZZIs)

Turns out, it’s a little bit not-so-awesome, because it appears to have been a planned shutdown of the motor, AND, as you can see/hear, the voice on the radio didn’t say restart, they said reset. Obviously this destroys like 20 years of nostalgia, and now I’m lost in life because my “restart <boom>” thing is all wrong.

The Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away (apologies to God).