Reviewing My Resolutions at the End of 3 Months of the Year 2012 (1st Calendar Quarter)

In the beginning of the year 2012, I had made a resolution about few things from a Professional, Career, and Personality Development standpoint (More about that here). Most of us make resolutions, and set goals etc. and all that is fine. But none of these is useful if we do not follow them sincerely with full commitment. So the question is, how do we know what we are upto, where we are headed, and what needs to be done (improvements/corrections) to meet our resolutions/goals. The simple answer to that is "monitor the progress" and "evaluate/measure at regular intervals" (more about this in a future post), in my case I have set the interval as 3 months, and hence this post.

Let me go through one by one.

Certifications - On Track

Had planned to take a couple of certifications this year and in fact I took the Certification Exam 70-448 (Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance) and cleared it. It was a great experience and in my opinion the real secret in cracking this examination is to read the book "MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 - Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance". It is an excellent book and is helpful not only for certification but also a great reference guide.

All looks good here, but still more to go! I am preparing for MCITP and will be taking it in the coming months. Let me see how it goes.

Blogging - Slightly Off Track

It's been quite a bit of time that I blogged though I planned to blog very frequently in the beginning of the year. Couple of reasons for that is, firstly little hectic days during this month and secondly, little bit of health problems now and then. But now everything looks on track and I would definitely start blogging as frequently as possible, and in fact I have planned a lot of things and will start posting stuffs starting in about a couple of weeks. So stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

Though overall, I didn't blog much, but still I managed to publish a bunch of articles as listed below.

Publish Date	Article Title
28-Mar-2012	SSAS Interview Questions Part I: Questions on Basic Concepts, Data Sources, and Data Source Views - MSSQLTips.com
23-Mar-2012	Windows Services for SQL Server - MSSQLTips.com
13-Feb-2012	Data Profiling Using T-SQL: Part 2 - Column Length Distribution
06-Feb-2012	Extracting Report URL from ReportServer database in SSRS
31-Jan-2012	SSRS - Report History is still maintained even after deleting the report from Report Manager - BeyondRelational.com
20-Jan-2012	Cumulative Aggregates in SQL Server Reporting Services - MSSQLTips.com
11-Jan-2012	SSIS Allows Creating Tasks with Same Name in Different Scopes - BeyondRelational.com
05-Jan-2012	Get First Hand Experience with Power View (Previously Crescent) using Live Sandbox
04-Jan-2012	Excellent Video Tutorials on C# Fundamentals for Beginners

Community Contributions - On Track

One of the goals/resolutions was to do as much community contribution as possible. Have been participating more frequently in the MSDN forums and there is quite a bit of improvement in terms of where I was in the beginning of the year and where I stand today in terms of Number of Answers, Number of Replies, Number of Points, Number of Medals etc. on the forums. Below is a quick snapshot of "Report as of 1st Jan 2012" vs. "Report as of 31st March 2012".

It gives a great amount of satisfaction to contribute in forums or any other websites or on this blog. I feel happy when the content I post solves someone's problem, save someone some time, helps someone in some way. I will try my best to continue to contribute more and more and stick to my resolution for the rest of this year.

Training - On Track
When it comes to giving trainings or delivering sessions, I have been preparing for few trainings and sessions in the coming days within the organization. Overall, I feel that I am still on track and things are looking good at this end. Hoping to give more sessions and trainings and help more and more people to get on-boarded to SQL Server BI (Microsoft BI).

Weight Loss - On Track
This is one of the areas, which I thought would be off-track, but to my surprise it's on track :)
Yes I have lost 3 KG of weight (Hurray!!) and it makes me really happy :-) and I feel proud of myself as I have been able to gain some control over my eating habits and managed to lose some weight without sacrificing much. Still a long way to go! Hoping to lose some more weight in the coming months and get to the state that I used to maintain during my college days.

Before we close on this, I am working on quite a few things and will start giving updates starting in next few weeks and hoping to see a positive response and timely feedback from my readers either online (comments on the blog) or offline (through email, social networking etc.). So stay tuned for more!!

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