Starting the Sabbatical

My first sabbatical in 20 years begins this fall quarter. I am beginning this blog for a couple of reasons: one is document what I do during the sabbatical, the other is to get the experience of blogging because I believe it could be a useful tool for my classrooms.

I have great ambitions for the next 4 months. I have a contract with Pearson Publishing for a textbook on beginning database. I want to bring that book as near to completion as I can. I also want to catch up with some new software. I have a VM with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 1. I want to see what I can learn about the Entity Framework, and, perhaps, Azure development. (Azure is about "Cloud Computing." I want to figure out how you connect to a database when you don't know where it is.) I might also explore some free database software, particularly PosGres SQL which I have ignored in the past. In addition I want to do some curriculum development and redesign my website.

In a different direction entirely, I want to work on my poems and stories. I have, in particular, two very long poems I want to complete. I may look into self publishing for those or just post them on a web site. I also have a half dozen short stories in various states of incompleteness. I would love to finish them and send them out. And, brewing in the back of my mind for a long time now, I have played with an idea for a novel.

This is probably all too ambitious, but I really don't want to waste this time.

I don't expect anyone much to read this blog. But if you want to know what I have been up to, it will be here.