In a little more than two weeks, I will be in one of my favorite places, San Diego, California, recruiting potential SAS Press authors at the JMP Discovery Summit, which will be held at the beautiful Paradise Point Resort and Spa from 14 September to 17 September 2015. I’m especially
Author
In just a few short days, I’ll fly cross-country to attend the Western Users of SAS Software conference (WUSS). I make no secret of the fact that I love California: San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, among others, are all great cities to visit. This year WUSS will be held
I’m headed to San Diego, June 1-4, for the annual PharmaSUG conference. PharmaSUG is the Pharmaceutical Industry SAS Users Group, consisting of professionals worldwide in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries who use SAS software in their work. I am representing SAS Publications in the Demo Room and would love to
I am a shopper. I always have been. As a teenager, a fun weekend for me was hours at the mall, trying on cool clothes, procuring perfume samples from the department store make-up counters, and hanging out with friends at the food court. But my love for shopping doesn’t end
He’s quick-witted, fit, and skilled with the written word, but there are many layers to SAS Press acquisitions editor George McDaniel. And George’s colleagues have taken the liberty of revealing some unique qualities of this multi-talented man. George's SAS Press superlative is: a) most likely to develop a conspiracy theory.
Last year I had the pleasure of working with SAS Executive Advisor for Retail Lori Schafer and retail veteran and former Montgomery Ward CEO Bernie Brennan on their new book, Branded! How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media and Mobility. The book presents eight case studies of retailers that are
I am a big sports fan—sort of. I like to watch the last quarter of the football game, the final inning of the baseball game, the last day of the golf tournament. You get the idea. So you would think that the fact that we are less than two months
Contributed by Christine Kjellberg and Stacey Hamilton “It's weird...you know the end of something great is coming, but you want to hold on, just for one more second...just so it can hurt a little more.” --author unknown As interesting as this journey toward the certification exam has been, it—like all
This week Christine and I covered chapter 13, “Combining SAS Data Sets.” Most of this material was quite straightforward, and we did surprisingly well on the quiz at the end. But when we came together to discuss the chapter, we realized we both had had issues with one section: the
Christine and I took the opportunity to slack off from our certification studying and blogging during SAS Global Forum. Not that we were actually in Seattle for the conference. But we used the relatively quiet time that resulted from nearly everyone being out of the office to catch up on
Like many of you, I’m closely following the last season of the ABC drama Lost. I’ve followed Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer et al. through six long years of island confusion. Now, with nine episodes left until the series ends for good, I can see how the writers are setting us
I’ve spent quite a while now going through chapter 8, “Creating Enhanced List and Summary Reports,” in the Base Certification Prep Guide. This topic should be straightforward, I keep telling myself. So why did I score 40% on the quiz? Thinking that I probably needed to delve a little deeper,
Last Friday I had the pleasure of spending a rewarding hour sitting with Jan Squillace, a technical support analyst for SAS. Jan actually reached out to Christine and me, inviting us to “sit in on an hour of Tech Support Phone Duty, just to see what happens in the real
We watched our favorite holiday movie last weekend: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Most who know me would be surprised to read that I start sobbing at about the time that Mr. Gower buys George his—alas, unused—around-the-world suitcase and don’t stop until (spoiler alert!) Clarence gets his wings. One
You may (or may not) have noticed, but we took the week off from our rigorous blogging schedule (and, frankly, from studying for the certification exam) to celebrate Thanksgiving. The tryptophan-filled turkey would have probably made me nod off in the pages of my certification guide anyway. My holiday was
I can still remember most of the lines of the poem: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both . . . I’ve forgotten what I ate for lunch yesterday, so for me to remember the words of Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken,”
Our day started in the exhibit hall with a delicious Tex Mex breakfast and lots of visitors interested in buying the speakers' books, which we have in stock for purchase. We have Wiley and SAS Business Series titles, including Thornton May's The New Know, as well as titles by Malcolm
Tuesday was a great day at M2009. I was able to talk to SAS Press author Randy Collica, who is working on a new edition of CRM Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner. I interviewed him and Curt Hinrichs, another SAS Press author, who is a coauthor of the
I’m tired. But in a good way. We had a great day in the SAS Publishing booth. We had a lot—and I do mean a lot—of traffic in the booth, much of it thanks to the early-bird book giveaway special. And I got to talk to a lot of cool
I had every intention of blogging daily from M2009 and PBLS, but I never found a free moment yesterday to write down anything. I don’t like to think about it because it makes me exhausted, but I think I stayed awake for 24 hours yesterday. After a delay in Dallas,
Have you seen that new show Glee? It is a musical-comedy about a glee club struggling to survive in a cheerleader-dominated world. Fox describes it as “a new comedy for the aspiring underdog in all of us.” I’m feeling like an aspiring underdog these days. But, like the kids in
“We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately” —Benjamin Franklin Burlington, Vermont, 14 September—Here I sit in my room in the Burlington Hilton, damp from getting lost in a rainstorm walking around a small college town. I reflect: Why am I watching Monday Night Football instead
Growing up in rural West Tennessee, I (sadly enough) experienced the world through my favorite television shows. These same programs influenced my career choices. At various times I was sure I was going to be a witty ER doc like Howie Mandel on St. Elsewhere or a gruff but beautiful