I hate commuting. There's no two ways of saying it, I despise it. Every day I face the 70 minute grind of trekking into London on a packed commuter cattle-wagon and the same back again. And I'm one of the lucky ones, I get on the train when there are still seats free. I pity the massed hoardes that have to attempt to squeeze on at Clapham Junction in the mock mosh pit that always ensues.
For a bloke that used to enjoy a 20 minute walk to work at his last job it is sometimes a little galling however I placate myself in the knowledge that my last job was -forgive the vernacular- crap! I left 15 months ago and had I not I wouldn't have been afforded the opportunities that Conchango have given me, I would certainly never have been able to touch upon Yukon and all that that entails and I wouldn't have had the chance to work with some of the stupendous people we have here that still never fail to impress me. Instead I would probably still be stuck in the drudgery of providing telephone support to some painstakingly stupid report analysts in a nameless UK high street banking organisation. Am I better off where I am now? Its a no-brainer really!
Anyway, onto the point of this posting. I now have the daily dilemma of how to fill up my 40 minutes on the train (sandwiched between 3 short walks and a trip on the Waterloo & City line). I'm not generally a bookworm (although I'm currently enjoying Stuart Maconie's delightfully anecdotal autobiography) so I generally spend my time addressing and posing questions on the SSIS newsgroups (I just wish I could access the SSIS forum offline). So, if you ever find yourself on the 7:50 from Teddington to London Waterloo and you see a guy tapping away obliviously on his laptop - its probably me!
Quite often I find myself building small demo packages that I post up to the newsgroups and as a result I now have quite a backlog of useful little packages - SSIS nuggets if you will (which is no way plagiarised from the MS UK MSDN team - honest!).
Rather than having them sitting here wasting away on my laptop, doomed to oblivion when it next crashes (I'm a negligent "backer-uper" I'm afraid) I thought it would be more beneficial to start posting some of them up here. So, watch out for some of these nuggets appearing up here in the next few weeks.
This is what we have (this should become an ever growing list):
And let me know what you think of them as well. If they're useful - let me know. And especially let me know if they're not, otherwise I'm just wasting my time :)
-Jamie