I was tagged by onpnt in his 2010 Goals post. So here is my short list of goals that I would like to accomplish in 2010

Upgrade our servers to SQL Server 2008

This is an easy one since it already happened this week. We went to new machines from machines that were 6 years old. I now have 16 times more RAM than previously. Instead of 4 HT CPUs I now have 8 CPUs and finally I am no longer on SQL Server 2000 at all. I really am glad that we upgraded; now I can use built in partitioned functions instead of the partitioned views I had to create to made that old box perform as well as it did. There is a ton of other stuff that we utilize now, here is just a tip of the iceberg: mirroring, date datatype, compression.

Read 2 books per month

There was a time when I commuted to NYC from Princeton and would read between 50 and 60 books per year. Now that my commute is mostly walking I don’t read that much, I like to increase that. So far I already have finished one book, this book is called Deamon and I already blogged about it here: Daemon by Daniel Suarez is a book every programmer will love

One way to read more is by using audio books, this way you can listen at the gym, while you are walking around etc etc. Audio books are sometimes read by really good people. A couple of audio books I really enjoyed are: Angels and Demons, Digital Fortress, and Daemon. Audio books really add another dimension to an already interesting book. For example those creepy synthetic voices in Daemon really bring the book to life. Some of the books that are on my list for this year are below.

Stephen King: Just After Sunset

Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (I have this book in Croatian)

Dan Brown: Digital Fortress (I have the Dutch version titled Het Juvenalis Dilemma)

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Roy Osherove: The Art of Unit Testing

David Allen: Getting Things Done

Daniel Suarez: Freedom

Lou Schuler/Alwyn Cosgrove: New Rules of Lifting

Since it is only January I am sure that some SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis books that deal with PowerPivot will be added to this list. Also after Visual Studio 2010 comes up I will pick up some C# 4.0 and .NET 4.0 books

Be more active in the SQL community

I am pretty active with blogging and on twitter but I took somewhat a hiatus in regards to answering questions in newsgroups forums/fora. This will change; starting next week I will pick up the slack again. I will also commit to writing 2 blog posts per week. Right now I have 247 blog posts on this site; it should be at 350 by the end of this year.

Watch more television

For some people this might seem strange because they would probably want to decrease the amount of television that they watch. I really watch maybe 2 or 3 hours of television a week and even then it is just mostly flipping channels. The show I watch most is House hunters International on HGTV. Just to show you how little television I watch, here is a list of show I have never even seen one episode of

Simpsons, Family guy, Lost, CSI (any flavor), Seinfeld, Baywatch, X files, 24, Frazier and this list goes on and on.

When I do watch shows it is mostly on HBO or Showtime, I love Sopranos, Oz, True Blood, Dexter, Californication…basically shows that run for 13 weeks and that don’t skip 2 months like for example Jericho. Jericho was of course the one network show I truly like and it was cancelled.

Play more computer games

There was a time when I played games on the computer at least a couple of day a week, this is when I had my Commodore 128 in the 1980s, I blogged about that here: What was your first computer and what were some of your favorite games?

These days I think the games are too complicated or you need to spend several hours just to learn how to play this game. I like my games to be simple..I have a weapon..you move ..I shoot. Games should be to relax not a commitment, if you don’t play for a week suddenly a whole bunch of people have higher levels than you in WoW.

So that is it…nothing major really…I decided not to tag anyone since it is already practically the middle of January.