Talk about perfect timing. I went to Best Buy during lunch after eating Chick-fil-a.

Yes… I love eating at that place.

I walked in and there on the shelf… A pretty white box with the word “Wii” written on it.

I grabbed it so fast someone probably thought I was stealing it…

After talking with the nice sales person, she said they got a shipment of 28 yesterday. By the time she came in to work this morning, there were only 17. I bought mine at 1:07 PM, and it was the last one on the shelf.

Now, I gotta get off the bloggin and get to playing some tennis!!!

Since Page and Dean have been telling me about how much they enjoy their Wii gaming systems… I really want one now.

Susanne and I were kid-less this weekend to celebrate our anniversary (Nine Years). We had a great idea on a way to spend our time, we could get a Wii. For the kids of course…

We decided to take a trip to Wal-Mart… Sold Out… Huh… that was not supposed to happen..

But we were determined… Off to Chick-fil-a to get some milkshakes and a phone book. (Side note: they have the best milkshakes in the world!) Susanne called everywhere in Florence…

No Wii in Florence??? That is crazy!!! We had to settle for a milkshake.

The story does not stop there… Sunday, after our nap… Susanne woke up with a cute little song to tell about our adventures.

Check out the full story here. Make sure your sound is on to get the full effect.

I now know what married people do with out kids…

BTW: This was my first adventure with a webcam and YouTube.

There was a RED package waiting on me when I got home from work today. 

I have been officially welcomed into the Friends of Red Gate program. The picture is my red box and it’s contents.

• One Thank you letter from Rachel Hawley, Marketing Associate @ Red Gate
• Ink Pen
• 256 Jump Drive
• Drink Coaster
• Coffee mug that reads “You may look at my Red Gate mug.  You may not borrow it.”
• Then one of the coolest marketing items I have seen recently. For the SQL Tool Belt, it is a miniature tool belt to hold pens that fits snugly around a coffee mug.
• And what an awesome t-shirt! “I didn’t get where I am today by wearing the wrong t-shirt”
• Of course, the greatest of all is copies of their software to use personally (Not For Resale).

Red Gate makes great SQL Server products and has been great to work with. Thanks Red-Gate for the  package. I will be writing more about the Red Gate suite of products of the next couple of weeks. I may even present at a Pee Dee Area .NET User Group what Red-Gate can bring to the development process.

By the Way, Red Gate wrote the greatest SQL Product to date: SQL Prompt (intenseness for SQL Server Management Studio & Query Analyzer)

I previously discussed COALESCE here but wanted to mention COALESCE again.

Side note: Don’t forget that SQLCE does not even support ISNULL, so you are required to use COALESCE.

Anyway; there is a great post here on COALESCE so I wanted to share it. It show how ISNULL and COALESCE handle different data types differently. COALESCE handles conversions a little more friendly. Check it out.

In their first example, they are doing the following.

DECLARE @i1 INT
SELECT ISNULL(@i1, 15.00) /2
SELECT COALESCE(@i1 , 15.00) /2

When the code reaches the select, the value of @i1 is NULL…

The ISNULL returns the whole/ integer value of 7. It bases it’s type off the variable’s type. COALESCE returns the value of 7.5 which of course is the correct answer. Visit this site to see another example using a varchar variables.

There is a place in this world for both results but the important thing is to be aware there are differences.

In case you were wondering about this COALESCE post, I was really just seeing how many times I could mention COALESCE in one post.

So, there ya have it, I mentioned COALESCE twelve times.