I created a new site for the excellent builder who did my major extension project last year

I created this small wordpress site as a favour to my excellent builder, Dave Evans, owner of DEP Building Services Ltd. Check out the site at depbuild.co.uk 

I created a new site for a friend of mine which is now live

I created a new wordpress based forum and blog for a friend of mine. Check it out at carbootqueen.co.uk This is my first foray into running forums via wordpress so it'll be interesting. It's very much in the beta stage right now, but should be fun to see what happens.

The site I wrote for my aunt is now live

After the success of the publishing of my aunt's book "Before I grow too old", I wrote her a small website to go with the book, suitable titled "Before I grow too old!

The new Undiscovered Stockholm site is now released

I work mostly on globalgoat.com nowadays, but I needed an additional outlet for all my Stockholm and Swedish thoughts, so I put together a small site called undiscoveredstockholm.com last month, which contains all my tips and thoughts about why Stockholm is a great place to live.

The new globalgoat.com with it's shiny new logo is released

After a few late nights (I'm very slow as wordpress and HTML design, very very slow) the first major revision of The new globalgoat is released. There's still much work to do, but the basics are there and are something to build upon.

Back in the summer of 2011 myself and Sarah decided that it was time to come back to the UK, primarily for family reasons. Despite our love of our Swedish lives, it was getting tougher keeping the children away from their grandparents and extended family, and also with most of our old UK friends having children of the same age, we knew that we were missing out somewhat on a larger social "family".

In November 2011 we managed to complete the move back to the UK and are now residing in South Croydon temporarily in a nice rented house in Sanderstead. I could tell you a long and painful story about the administrative difficulties of moving across countries with young children, but hey, we got it done and everyone was just fine in the end.

This meant at the time that I had to give up my job at Basefarm, which was painful to do as I was just really starting to get deeply embedded and had a million plans I wanted to see through, but so is life sometimes. Fortunately I'm still working for them on a part time consulting basis and who knows what the future may hold for our working relationship. I miss Sweden terribly but seeing how the children have thrived around their family in the UK, we know it was the right decision for this moment in time.

I'm currently working as Database Architect for dotDigitalGroup in Croydon. They're what I would call a mature start up and I'm trying to bring their data, procedures and control into the 21st century :)

At the same time I've formally registered my long treasured globalgoat name as a company and am working independently at a consultant through that. As such I've moved this long running personal blog back to blogger hosting, and started to build a new globalgoat.com

Go over and check it out!

My colleagues are working at Dreamhack - a good reason to be happy at work

4 months into my new job, and obviously there are some ups and downs. It's certainly different moving from one of the largest software companies in the world, to a small Nordic hosting company, but it's for reasons like this post about working at Dreamhack, that I'm glad to be there so far. I work with some very interesting and skilled people, and that's a cool thing.

http://blog.basefarm.com/blog/2011/06/19/employees-at-basefarm-are-building-the-network-for-dreamhack/

Much respect to Martin and Robin for their amazing work.

Time to reset again

5 years after I moved to Sweden and joined Microsoft, it's become time to randomise everything again. Today is my last day with the SQL Server team at MS, and I'm off to join a small nordic tech company called Basefarm on the 14th February.

I'm a bit scared, a bit nervous, a bit excited as one often is when stepping off into something new. Most of all though right now I'm rather sad to be saying goodbye to a ton of great people here at Microsoft Sweden. I made some great friends and learnt alot from many people here, but it's time to move on do something completely different, hence the transfer to a company with about 200 employees as opposed to 100,000!

from my MSDN blog: How to configure Extended Events in SQL Server 2008 to track and log unpredicatable syntax errors submitted to SQL Server

This week on my MSDN SQL Server blog:

How to configure Extended Events in SQL Server 2008 to track and log unpredicatable syntax errors submitted to SQL Server.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/grahamk/archive/2010/12/10/extended-event-to-track-and-trace-syntax-errors.aspx

These techniques can easily be adjusted to track and trace any type of SQL Server error or warning that you're having trouble tracing using more traditional (old school) techniques.

Just back from a week in Fårö, Gotland

044
Originally uploaded by GlobalGoat

This is the beach we were staying on, at a place called Sudersands.