Introductions, Mostly of the Author

Oh, hello there. Congratulations, you have found the very first post of the blog. Which means, I suppose, that I need to tell you a few things.

First things first. (I want to make a sorting joke here, but good sort management is no laughing matter.) (I'm serious, no laughing.) My name is Marshall Smith. I am known on BOB: The Business Objects Board as Lugh. I am totally unknown on Twitter as @MabonReports (because I really don't follow Twitter any more). I am known other places by other names, but that's in my non-professional life. My age is somewhere between college and retirement. Okay, almost exactly halfway between. I graduated from Davidson College back before they had a computer science degree (my one programming class was part of my physics lab course). After some wacky derailing of my career, I ended up in databases. I started with Access, got my Oracle DBA certification, and promptly started building Crystal Reports against SQL Server. Because my life doesn't know from plans. Crystal led to Business Objects, and now I'm a business intelligence professional.

I am currently employed at CRGT, Inc. (by the time you read this, it may be Salient-CRGT, Inc.). My current position is doing BI development using the Business Objects suite (Web Intelligence, SAP Dashboard Designer (nee Xcelsius)) and Tableau. I also have several years of experience on the administration side of Business Objects, and am currently training on the administration side of Tableau.

Wait! I hear a cry of confusion! What the heck is Mabon Solutions, then? Well, the answer is relatively simple. It's my consulting company. Except for the part where it's not actually a company. A while back, a former employer asked me to continue doing some maintenance on a project I had completed. I felt that I needed a company name. So I did some Googling and found a name that was reasonably unique, easy to spell, and felt good to me. (I have kind of a thing for Celtic stuff.) Of course, as I only ever had one client, I never got around to little things like a business license. So I still love it as the name of my company, even if that company is wholly theoretical.

So now what? Well, I guess you look around to see if I have anything else to say. Which is pretty likely, unless you happened to come on the first day this blog was opened. Hopefully you like some of it. If you do, I make the standard requests of any blog: READ. COMMENT. SHARE. These things are very important for a blog to thrive. I'm not doing this just to hear myself ramble. If I wanted to do that, I'd just take a shower. Let me know what you like and don't like. If you find stuff you like, tell your friends. If you don't have friends, tell some strangers and pretend they're your friends. Then maybe we can all be friends together.

THANKS, GUYS! KEEP READING!