I have some work to make up this weekend so my Saturday will be pretty busy. I'm making a "fourth quarter" push to finish up a huge project hopefully by mid-month February. But I'll take a break in the work to see what has been going on.

• Joel announces version 2.0 of their Copilot remote control tool. While I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet as most of our clients I have a direct VPN in, I have used their trial and it is pretty slick. I keep it in my toolbox for that odd ball time when nothing else will do. Some nice new features including direct connect if possible resulting in possibly faster connections, file transfer, and support for the Mac for those so inclined. Also the lowering of the 24 day pass to $5 makes it so much more inviting.
• Forgotten SQL Functions – Jason brings up a good point, how often do we go about creating the greatest function to perform some operation only to discover that it's already available built-in? Whether it's SQL or .NET, C# or VB.net doesn't really matter as I'm always discovering something new. I have to agree with a few of the commenter's in the original post. COALESCE is the bomb. See here for a performance comparison between Coalesce and IsNull. Also here is a novel usage of the Coalesce function to build a comma-delimited string.