Sunday, November 7, 2010

A Fall Day in Montréal

One slightly uncomfortable - yet thankfully short! - plane ride and I've landed in Montréal for a whirlwind tour. I'm very grateful and excited to be travelling with Rupinder Dhillon from Toronto as the featured speaker at tomorrow's MONSUG meeting! Rup is well-known and admired by SAS users in the greater Toronto area for her expertise of SAS Enterprise Guide and coding techniques as well. This time, Rup will be exploring Enterprise Guide 4.3! I'm very excited to see what she does and how it works.... excited and a bit nervous. She'll be using my machine and I had EG 4.3 installed on Monday! Let's hope we're bug-free... :)



Tomorrow's meeting also features Jean Hardy reprising the talk he gave on passing results to and from Excel last week in Quebec City as well as Nadia King who will be looking at the A.I.D.E. methodology. It promises to be a great meeting with around 130 registered. I'm looking forward to an energetic, boisterous room as per usual.



I'm also very excited to see the MONSUG executive committee, M. Eric Lacombe and M. Mathieu Gaouette. The last two SAS Global Forum's I've attended have been punctuated by having a fantastic time with both of them. Lots of laughs and great meals, to be sure! I'm looking forward to more of the same following tomorrow's meeting.



Speaking of SAS Global Forum, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that registration officially opens this Monday, November 8th. This year's edition is taking place in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada from April 4-7, 2011. I will be attending and will be hosting the (in)famous Canadian Night Out... this year's theme, TBD (we're moving away from the Canadian Trivia model: while lots of fun, it's getting a little too dangerous!). the conference is a tremendous opportunity for learning, networking and socializing with the greater SAS global community: don't miss out if you can help it.



My next few weeks are going to be really hectic ones. There are a whole host of meetings taking place across the country: I'll be in British Columbia next week while my colleagues attend the Ottawa and Halifax meetings which are right around the corner. I'll be running the Health User Group in Toronto as well, and I'll have one last trip in me: back to Montréal for the Business Analytics Forum with Rick Miller of CIBC on December 8th. With one final Toronto Area SAS Society meeting in mid-December, I'll be poised to wish everyone tiding's of the season and enjoy a well-earned break myself... but in between now and then, I'll have lots to say in this space, so do stay tuned!



I'll hopefully be able to get my thoughts on paper tomorrow following the meeting to tell you all about it; if not tomorrow than certainly very soon. For now though, my mind and my stomach are one and the same; I can't wait to go out with Rup for some delicious food and drink and talk SAS for a while...

Until then!

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