Denali, in an evaluation version, has been out for a little while now. I even have a copy on my computer and I’m working one of our analysts to learn the ins and outs- fun stuff!  According to Microsoft, though, the official release will hit shelves April 1st.  I’m not quite sure why Microsoft chose to release Denali on a day that’s well known for Google hi-jinx (Google Paper anyone?) but I’m sure they have their reasons.

Get the evaluation version here, and check out Brent Ozar for some useful information here. Find out more information on the release here.

We had a busy holiday season here, but not too busy that we forgot how to have fun We hosted a Mad Men themed potluck, complete with cocktails. It was great to see everyone dressed to the nines. Thanks for playing along!

Just last night I had a rather lengthy conversation about the old-growth trees along the Olympic Peninsula. According to the Peninsula Daily News (from 2/2011), the Olympic National Park sees around 3,000,000 visitors annually, though there’s debate about the traffic counter’s accuracy.  Are you one of the 3 million?

I wonder if anyone has tried to see all of these old trees. I suspect there’s a dendrologist somewhere with it on their bucket-list

There were more costumes too, and some brilliant karaoke by even our newest crew members. Fun was had by all!

I know, I know, old news. This happened in Paris already.

But you know what? Post-it wars are fun. I saw an angry bird up in the window across the street and then noticed the space invader a few floors up and Pac Man a few doors over. We just had to join in.

Turns out it looks like the folks over at Health Solutions Network started with Pac Man and Runic Games did the space invaders. PlacePlay followed suit, setting off the folks across from us, and now there’s a smile face above them.

I hope this keeps going.

Thanks GeekWire, for getting this rolling with your article here with original Pine Street Space Invader attack .

Deleted City

I remember the Math Olympiad and the Science Olympiad in high school, but for some reason I never thought of the practice continuing out of the classroom.  Since school is supposed to prepare you for the real-world, I don’t know why I was surprised to come across this project from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Welcome to the Business Intelligence Olympiad! Every two years, starting in 2008, the city of Charlotte pits business unit teams from different city departments against each other to address a fictional problem with analytics and data sets.

I’m sure the competition leads to plenty of laughter and good-hearted competition, but according to the article I read, it’s also created an environment where “a lot of information that previously had not be [sic] shared is now shared regularly between BI analysts throughout the city.”  The competition in 2010 included a fictitious hurricane that bore a striking resemblance to Irene.

“The underlying benefit was with Hurricane Irene coming up the coast almost on the same track as the theoretical Hurricane Vixen from December, teams were more used to looking at contingencies and how they affected portions of their business,” [manager of data administration for the city of Charlotte] Raper said.

As far as I know there isn’t something comparable in Seattle, but maybe there should be. Is it time for a BI Olympiad with data from the viaduct?

For more about Charlotte’s Olympiad, see the original article from govtech.com here.

Oh yeah, and water balloons. I forgot how much fun water balloons are! I’ll update the slideshow as I get more photos.

As you may know by now, a rare earthquake happened on the East Coast yesterday.  But how did you find out?  Piraeus alumni Evan Nagle analyzes the social network response quite nicely.  From his blog entry:

I think the earthquake shook a little dust off the social shelf and shed a wee bit of light on what exactly each social network “is” and “is for”.

Read his analysis here.

Social networks aren’t something to be ignored. I know that sounds sort of like a “well, duh!” statement.  Surprisingly, I still hear the I’m just not interested in what so-and-so had for breakfast! It isn’t all eggs and toast.  Social media gives data-junkies tons to play with, amazing tools to crowd source from and entirely new headaches for HR departments.

Social media is still evolving, as I suspect it will be for a long time. Policies will have to change, and there will be new ways of processing all of the data.  My hope is for more visualizations

(image credit: Mentalpez)

We’ve been hard at work designing and building Windows 9, and today we want to begin an open dialog with those of you who will be trying out the pre-release version over the coming months…

Interestingly, Steve Sinofsky also writes

We’ll… make mistakes and admit it when we do. It is almost certain that something will hit a nerve, with the team or with the community, or both, in the blog posts or in the product, or both. In any case, we’ll work hard to have constructive conversations with you, share the data, and, when the situation calls for it, make thoughtful changes.

I’m intrigued to see how this will play out.  The release of the first blog post coincides nicely with news of the Google/Motorola deal–doesn’t seem like coincidence.

The real question: if I go to BUILD, Microsoft’s conference for hardware and software developers in Anaheim, CA in September, do I get to hang out wherever this photo was taken? It sure makes me want to swim with the goldfish