I’m looking forward to seeing the group again and chatting afterward with new PASS Board member Kendal Van Dyke.

Here’s the current schedule:

Or at least I wouldn’t complain if replacing it was a little less pricy. List price at Dell is about $140. Maybe it just seems expensive? $50 a year, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Still, seemed worth a quick search to see what non-Dell prices would be. Lots of hits, but reading the reviews on Amazon there are a lot – LOT – of cases where the battery failed after a week, or failed on install. It seems Dell only wants Dell batteries to work.

Can’t say I like that. With SSD’s, hard drives, memory, it’s a free market, I can buy wherever and have a reasonable chance it will work. With batteries,not so much. I found one on Amazon for $80 that looked like an original battery,no bad comments so far. Worth $60 to take the chance of having to return it? Yes, if for no other reason than being stubborn! It arrived today and so far works fine. Looks like the old one, no glitches – and really, why should there be? We’ll see.

Back to the cost. My view is that it is expensive. I’ll probably buy a new machine this year, Mac Air or an Ultrabook, and figure that it will be around $1000. Hard not to think about just applying that $140 (and maybe the $200 I spent on the SSD) towards the new one. The SSD I can move around and reuse. The battery? Nope!

I haven’t dug deeply, but I suspect it isn’t just Dell. All those devices with the non-removable batteries, you pay a premium there too. Probably other laptop manufacturers are similar. Do the batteries really need to be that custom? Why isn’t there a common battery standard like we have for flashlights and kids toys? Much like phone vendors profited from custom chargers, this too seems like a profit center.

I’m going to start with some features I’ve long wanted, then loop back to what the tool model looks like:

1. Effective emailing. I want the ability to quickly and easily send a logo’d message with an unsubscribe link to various portions of the chapter list. That’s base functionality and we could copy the idea from how SQLSaturday mailings work.
2. Bounce management. Member addresses go stale. Cleaning the list is busy work, work that tools can do for us.
3. RSVP. I like Eventbrite. Maybe we could do an API level integration to continue that, but I think there is more value in building a simple RSVP system.
4. Event calendaring and reminders. I want the ability to describe an event (date, speaker, etc) and then schedule a series of reminders based on that, all including automatic links to the RSVP page and an iCal attachment. Ideally it would post the event to LinkedIn and include that link too, and of course announcements on Twitter.
5. A blog that supports LiveWriter. Most of the “content” on a chapter web site would fit will into the blog format.
6. Sponsor management. Two parts here. One is an easy way to schedule and assign various ads to appear on the site and in emails, with click tracking,to various ad locations. The other is capturing funds. This might be similar to SQLSaturday where they pick from a list of sponsor levels,but more likely would be picking from a list of dates (with the cost attached).
7. Speaker management. Make it easy for a speaker to submit a presentation once the scheduling has been figured out (and it needs to be a standard format to make the message building easier).

I could go on, but if we had those capabilities, what a time savings! I see all of those as things that are implemented as ‘back office’ functionality and accessed through something like opass.org/tools. If we build that on a layer of services, we get lots of presentation layer options.

For the presentation layer I don’t think DNN as it’s offered to chapters is good enough. Let’s look as some ideas:

1. Continue to offer DNN. It’s a powerful platform and for those that take time to learn can do big things, and it’s skinnable. Add tools/widgets to support the ideas above, and come up with some smoother layouts by default. Not my favorite option, but not in favor of rip and replace at the expense of those who have invested time in their site already.
2. Add an option to support WordPress. Tradeoffs here. Great tools for blogging, tons of plug-ins to do lots of stuff (like post to Twitter), not so good at member management (though there are some plugs-in that support that, like BuddyPress).
3. Build a true vertical. Spend some money on making it look good (see SQLSaturday, SQLRally, but clearly NOT the  PASS site) and make it first class.

In terms of time to market, WordPress wins, and it has a multi-site hosting model. It’s probably “good enough” and there is that huge market of themes and plug-ins. I think that is the starting place and then we can look to see if we need the vertical – or if we just need to write a few PASS specific plug-ins.

I think the Year of the Chapter has been too long in coming – will it be this year? Post your own ideas about what PASS can do to better support Chapters, or send new Chapter Director Allen Kinsel (LinkedIn, Twitter) a note supporting mine, either way – let’s challenge him to post a strategy and execute on it so that when he runs for re-election this fall we’ll have something to base our vote on.

I’ve only used it for a few days in test mode and I’m taken by the simplicity. Imagine having that email reminder in your inbox every day 15 minutes before the end of your work day and you spend a couple minutes recording what you did. It’s a nice reminder, it still works if you reply the next day, and you get a nice clear set of notes that you can look back to. That’s just one way to use it!

There is a provision to share access to your calendar – a link you can enable or disable, plenty good enough for this type of application. You can export your results to CSV, which is very nice, but it does combine all your notes for a day into one line. Here is an example from my test:

I haven’t decided if this become a long term tool for me yet. I do think it’s an option I’ll be talking about in my professional development talks as a way to track progress, and I think it might be an interesting way for someone to get their feet wet in blogging – set a goal of logging one idea per day to write about, get over that fear of ‘nothing to write about’.

I was catching up with group leader Bonnie Allard before the meeting and she has an awesome arrangement for the group:

• First class space
• A deal with students there to set up the room each month
• Pizza ordered from the cafeteria and delivered to the room

It was the third anniversary of the group, something that I think came as a surprise to them. They started, kept going, and suddenly it’s three years! Congratulations to the group, takes perseverance to keep a group going in a small town.

I gave my presentation about professional development plans and had the luxury of about 1.5 hours to talk, allowing me to spend some extra time on a few portions. One of the things we talked about during the presentation was certifications – are they worth doing? My standard answer is that they are superb for driving learning, especially in the MS world, but rarely make the difference when it comes to getting a job. Bonnie had an example of a time when it did make the difference for her,interesting to hear. It hasn’t changed my mind on certs,but it’s a good reminder that when you interview you accentuate what you have – never know what will resonate with the interviewer.

Two of the attendees came to this presentation almost a year ago in Tampa and in both cases they said taking time to think through their goals and build a rough plan made a difference. One comment was that “it helped me decide what to spend time on”. Good stuff!

It was a nice evening. Low key group, good conversation, good to see old friends.

Winning, in the context of every day work, isn’t easy to define in a way that is satisfying.

I find that more and more I want to work (play) in scenarios where winning is hard, but not quite Kobayushi Maru hard.

Ads pay the bills. In theory personalized ads are a win for both sides. In practice? Not so sure.