A Busy Fall Now Includes Speaking at PASS Summit

Fall is looking pretty exciting from where I'm standing. I've got a few travel events lined up, a couple projects nearing completion, and the anticipation/dread of MVP renewal day on October 1st.
Events
I've got an internal company training event mid-October where close to our whole IT team gets together to share where we're at, as well as expose each other to what future projects are close to coming online.  It's not a big team, but we're spread out across the continent, so actually seeing people face to face isn't a usual occurrence.
The guys that work on our internally-developed ERP system have been doing some excellent UX work recently, so I'm looking forward to having them show some of those features as well as what they've got in the pipeline.  It won't be this year, but the time when we move away from ISAM to a real RDBMS is coming too.  We haven't started evaluating, but SQL Server is (of course) in the mix, and likely a Postgres variant too.  But when you have to live with a badly supported ODBC ISAM driver, just about any database vendor will do!
We've also (finally) got some new server hardware coming online which is carrying with it a bunch of other goodies.  We run a Citrix remote environment and will be moving to XenApp 6 on the new hardware.  The move should also include an upgrade to Office 2010 if internal app remediation projects continue to exhibit positive results.  I'll be explaining the changes and new features in Office 2010 - and this provides an opportunity to expose people to PowerPivot to see if it can generate some interest.  I'm pretty sure that the server-side management framework will be appealing to help control the spreadsheet sprawl.  Although if it does, that will mean somebody will have to bone up on SharePoint, which we haven't deployed nicely yet.  (Is an "elegant Sharepoint deployment" an oxymoron?)
Early November is jam-packed full of fun.  I'll be at SQL Connections in Las Vegas presenting a trio of SSIS ETL sessions - if you're going to be there, please introduce yourself!  It's the first time I've gone to Connections, and it will be very interesting to compare it to...
...The PASS Summit that's in Seattle the next week.  In the spring, I sent in the maximum number of proposals to get a session slot in the main conference, but failed to make the cut.  But failure is supposed to be just another opportunity to try again, so I consoled myself that there was always next year.  Then Jeremiah Peschka announced that PASS would open some slots from the traditionally Microsoft-only Chalk Talk segment of sessions to community submissions.  Unfortunately, they didn't mention a limit on the number of applications, so I believe my attempt to overwhelm them ended up overwriting my initial abstracts.  The good news is that they happened to like one of the topics that did stick, and I'm now officially a speaker at the seminal event of the SQL Server world.  I'll be hosting a discussion on debugging Integration Services packages - in development and in production.  I've got a few techniques, and anticipate some suggestions and advice from attendees on the topic to make it really fruitful.  At least - I hope to have an audience there, otherwise the one-sided "dialogue" will result in me being carted off to the Buck Woody wing of whatever sanitarium Microsoft endowed for him in the Seattle area.  So for the legions of followers one fan of this blog, I do expect to see you there.
Projects
I have a few company projects nearing internal (informal) milestones - most notably I've set (and plan to reach) targets on my data warehousing initiative.  It's taken far too long to get to where it is, but I think I can finally start to see... the real start of the project :)
But perhaps most exciting is that it's only a matter of time (like always) until I get version 1.6 of the Kimball Method Slowly Changing Dimension component for Integration Services released.  I've already got an alpha up on CodePlex that I've got some feedback from - many thanks to those that took the risk.  I'm much more satisfied about the internal thread management behaviour, even though I'm dissatisfied with the internal code organization of it.  I would really like to get this finished up in October so that I have something cool to talk about when people ask me "what do I do" at the conferences.  (Well - at least I'll think it's cool.)
MVP Renewal Day
You may or may not know that I'm reaching the anniversary of my year as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.  You may or may not know that this is an annual award, and continued recognition isn't a given - it's an honour that you have to earn anew.  For that, I'm very grateful, because it means a continual high quality of resources that are easily recognizeable to the community.
There are four renewal days each year - one per quarter - and over the last year I've seen some remarkable professionals receive their due with this award.  (I'm certain I'll miss people in this list, but) Tim Mitchell, Ted Kreuger, and Nitesh Rai were new recipients over the last year, demonstrating the high bar of contribution and expertise required to be awarded.  I hope I make that bar and get renewed, because it sure does help my credibility (with people that don't otherwise know me) if I can keep those three letters after my name.
One of the influential people within my organization is fond of saying that he "doesn't want to belong to any group that will have him."  His intent is to express that he's striving to achieve membership in groups that don't yet think he's good enough - and I certainly subscribe to that mentality.  However, being an MVP isn't quite the same as an exclusive country club membership or appearing on Page Six.  I can say wholeheartedly that I'm very fortunate to have been included in its ranks - if even for just a year.