+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.
Even though it's not a military site these days, apparently the Alamo still sees some action. A colleague and I noticed the helicopters hovering overhead during our lunch break yesterday. Advice to conference attendees: don't leave your pleather conference satchel unattended in a public place, lest the local authorities detonate
Tell an experienced SUGI/SAS Global Forum presenter that you are presenting at SAS Global Forum. One of the first questions he or she will ask you is: "What time is your talk?" Because scheduling matters. Certain time slots have a notoriety of their own. For example, "10:30 Monday" means you
Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing? That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction: More and more SAS programmers are
If you think that baby names and data analysis have nothing to do with one another, then you haven’t read Freakonomics. When my wife and I were expecting our third daughter, we had specific criteria in mind for her name. I used SAS Enterprise Guide and data from the Social
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
Information Week released its list of 15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference In 2008. From the article: Meet 15 people who will help shape the business technology world in the coming year. They're not the usual suspects -- the names everyone knows. Several are industry and tech
Even if you don't use Microsoft Office 2007, you might have noticed more ".xlsx" files floating around lately. Perhaps you've been sent one or two that you can't open. XLSX is one of the new Microsoft Excel 2007 file formats. (Others include XLSB and XLSM.) Like many software applications, SAS
Hot off the reel, the SAS for Dummies podcast is now available. Tune in now and hear the juicy tidbits of the story behind the book. Okay, it's no E! True Hollywood Story, but it's as exciting as I get without being on fire. P.S. Shelly Goodin from SAS Press
In a recent Dr. Dobb's Journal piece, Jim Starkey (senior architect for MySQL ) acknowledges that it's time to embed the power of applications within databases, instead of the other way around. Jim says (italics added by me): I think we can agree that context switches or network round trips
Our SAS usage notes usually do a great job of matching symptoms to solutions. But good old SAS note 10751 really stretches the limits of logic. The symptom: a message during the SAS 8.2 setup process that says "string variable is not large enough for string". The solution: "To circumvent
