+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
I really enjoyed this blog post by AnnMaria: "The Sea Monkey Effect prevents robot uprising". I think my reading experience was enhanced because I met* the author at SAS Global Forum yesterday. AnnMaria should apply for a grant and enter into the annals of improbable research. *(She told me that
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of a woman who is widely appreciated as "the first programmer". At SAS I work with a lot of programmers and other technical folks, many of whom are women (including my boss and my boss' boss). I tend to take this for granted,
During SAS Global Forum, I had the privilege of sneaking backstage at the Technical Session to meet with keynote speaker Dave Barry. I made it abundantly clear to everyone involved, this meeting was all about me and my opportunity to meet a literary legend. The fact that I was on
Right now I'm packing up my materials for SAS Global Forum. It's actually a lot easier than it used to be. My first SAS conference was SUGI 21 (1996), and we didn't have personal laptop computers or USB drives or fast network connections. Machines were staged weeks ahead of time
64-bit computing has arrived to the mainstream desktop (and even laptops). Can you even buy a 32-bit Windows PC anymore? I mean from a store (not a garage sale)? At work, I've just been issued a shiny new Windows box with the 64-bit edition of Microsoft Vista installed on it.
Useful charts can serve to persuade an audience of certain "truths", because they take real data and communicate it in a clear, visual medium. But what happens when you know something to be true, but you have no real data? Should you let the lack of hard data prevent you
Before it was considered cool to tweet information to the world, SAS users who were hungry for inside information came to rely on a Little Birdie -- as in "a Little Birdie told me..." sasCommunity.org has a nice history of the Little Birdie. The article mentions the "Jurassic period"; does
The SAS output delivery system (ODS) makes it so easy to create great-looking output that many folks forget that you can make it even better. One step that folks often leave out: applying a custom title for HTML output. I'm not talking about the title text that you see as
So, you want to do two things at once? When you use SAS Enterprise Guide to create a project, the work items in that project typically run one at a time, in series. For example, consider the following process flow: In this flow, SAS Enterprise Guide will run the tasks
When I applied for a job at SAS over 15 years ago, I didn't even know what the company did. [Insert dummy joke here.] Most of what I knew about the company came from colleagues at my former workplace who, perhaps in an effort to make themselves feel better, described
