I was in Orlando, FL last week at a SQL Server Integration Services course taught by Brian Knight. I have to say that was probably the best technical training class I have been to in a while. I was at a general SQL Server 2005 course earlier in the year and it was fairly generic and poorly taught. I wish I could have picked up a more targetted course.

As for the SSIS course I learned so much and found so many flaws in how I was doing SSIS before. I have to go back to some of my older packages and redo some of the control flow. I also have quite a few new packages in my mind that I don't know where to begin. I'll have some new backup SSIS packages to create as well as some new automations for marketing. If you would like to read up on SSIS, Brian Knight has written a couple books for Wrox. The one he gave to us in class is the Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services book.

Ok so I like Visio and I like to diagram my tiny little network sometimes. Here is the latest version.

As you can see I am a heavy Microsoft user. I like it for what it does and it does what it's suppose to do.

Some notes

1. I used to install everything on one server; IIS, SQL, VS2005. But with VMware being free I decided to get one larger box and virtualize all of the servers into services into separate virtual servers.
   
2. I know that using eval beta Windows Server 2008 is silly for a "production environment" but so far Windows Server 2008 is very stable and the new interface and management module is very slick to use and easy to read.
   
3. Once Windows Server 2008 is released I'll change the VM Host from 2003 to 2008 and have AD on the VM Host as well. AD as a VM is damn silly right now.
   

Been playing too many triple A titles lately to notice the mod community and I wish I hadn't have left them behind.

I wanted to see where Zombie Panic Source was at and of course they have yet to release anything to the public, but along the search I found Zombie Master. Its a Zombie mod for HL2 but not entirely FPS. The humans play the FPS portion with objectives while a random player is chosen for to be the Zombie Master. His role is played out like an RTS with the Zombie Master being a omnipotent over head view of the game. They get to send points to spawn AI zombies and place traps for the players.

I had also been waiting for a Sven Coop for HL2 and in the shadows was Synergy. I wanted to be able to play the campaign with other players but this looks to more complete than some of the other mods from long ago.

Lastly I wanted to play the Star Wars Battlefront 2 with the capitol ship battles but never did get into it but Eternal Silence might cover all my needs for a capitol ship action game. With a little mix of FPS and space combat, this might actually be some fun in there. 

All three of these will be taking up some of my time this week since I have been lacking in some down and out dirty barrel in your face action. If as all mods happen to be a lack of population well I can always get some gibbing on with TF2.