Here for your reading pleasure are answers to a few of the questions that people occasionally ask of me or Sean.
(To Sean) Hey, are you related to that MidnightDBA girl, Jen McCown?
Seriously?? Guys, Sean started up MidnightDBA over a year before I came on board, and he’s got the majority of the training vids out there. Quit looking disappointed when he’s at an event and I’m not…I may be the pretty one, but he’s the gosh-durn MVP!
So, like, you do a podcast or something?
Actually, we’ve got several things going on (see the About and Pubs page for more details on my stuff):
- First off, we make training videos and publish them on MidnightDBA.com.
- We also do a weekly webshow (excepting August) called DBAs@Midnight. Season 1 ended in July 2010, and Season 2 began on September 3, 2010. We recently started live streaming the filming at 11pm CST, Friday nights, on our UStream channel.
- AND I do an intermittant MidnightDBA Blogcast, available on the site and on iTunes.
What’s up with the podcast not updating on iTunes? The videos are up on your website, but the last one in iTunes was from a month ago.
Well, the short answer is that Sean does ALL the video production, and he’s not very good at keeping up with updatin the iTunes feed. That’s actually the long answer, too. We’re sorry, we know it’s inconvenient…I’ll see if I can’t take that over…
So, like, how much money are you making off of this whole MidnightDBA thing anyway?
Well first let me say I’m glad you consider us close enough friends to ask…I feel the same way about you! But the answer is $0. We don’t have sponsors, we only sell swag through the Zazzle store, and any profits from that go to more site giveaways. In the interests of transparency, I will say that we have good relationships with publishers and product vendors, and we often get books or items to review. Some we keep, and most we give away to you and the North Texas User Group.
Oh, okay. So why are you doing all of this, then?
Well first, there’s great value in teaching. We say, you don’t know a subject until you’ve taught it. Working through the wording and the details of even a basic topic enough to put on video or blog really flushes out what you do or don’t know. Plus, we’re creating an online knowledge store for ourselves; I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone back to look up something I blogged a few months ago, or pointed a co-worker to one of our videos.
Plus, you know, someday someone will offer us $100mil for the site, and we’ll totally be in the money. Yeah…
What’s up with Twitter? There’s a @MidnightDBA and a @JenniferMcCown…
I know it’s a little confusing. MidnightDBA on Twitter is nearly always me. Sean tweets about once every 3-4 weeks (whereas I tweet every 3-4 minutes). I made the MidnightDBA account originally just as a place to send out updates on blogs and videos, then I quickly realized that the Twitter SQL community is about much more than that. We update, we retweet, we joke, we Rickroll, we talk #bacon. If you’re not there, you should join us.
Oh, and the @JenniferMcCown account is more my personal account. The two aren’t strictly separated, but I try to generally keep home life there.
I really liked that “Evil Jen” blog entry. When will we see Evil Jen again?
Evil Jen is always around, though she’s not usually that outspoken. If you have a question for Evil Jen, go ahead and email me…she doesn’t give out her email to anyone, so she’s always at #InboxZero. (Told you she’s a horrible DBA.)
Your MidnightDBAs
The @MidnightDBA Twitter photo looks like a two headed person, is that really the case? Are you aliens?
Wouldn’t you like to know. (Question courtesy of @LadyRuna)
What’s that song you use in your blogcast, again? Is there a link?
The song is “Crackalackin“, by Al Phlipp and the Woo Team. Unless you’re listening to one of the first few BlogCasts, in which case it’s “You Don’t Need an iPod” by Uncle Seth.
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