It's only January, and SAS Global Forum 2008 isn't until March, but folks around here have already been preparing for months.

For my part, I'm on the hook for two papers: one "invited" (submitted and accepted by the SAS Global Forum committee) and one as a "SAS Presents" (topics that SAS offers and that we hope customers will benefit from).

My papers and their abstracts:

The Perfect Baby Name: One Dad’s Quest Using SAS.
If you think that baby names and data analysis have nothing to do with one another, then you haven’t read Freakonomics. When we were expecting my third daughter and were selecting her name, we had specific criteria in mind. This paper describes how I used SAS Enterprise Guide and data from the Social Security Administration to select a list of candidate names and how this helped us embark on the process with our eyes wide open.

Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide (co-authored with my colleague Bill J. Gibson).
In this paper, you can read about the productivity gains that you can enjoy when you add SAS Enterprise Guide to your SAS programming toolbox. You will see how to perform old tasks in a new way as well as how to accomplish some tasks that would be have been very difficult — if not impossible — without the benefit of an integrated tool like SAS Enterprise Guide. Topics in this paper include:

• Working with projects and the process flow
• Getting the most from SAS tasks
• Flexing your power with project prompts
• Conditionally running portions of your project
• Noting a few things that you can’t do

These will both be part of the proceedings, which will be available at the time of the conference or shortly thereafter.