Thursday 08 January 2009

Bleak and industrial, we're not and never will be

disk storage is cheap

I find it weird that I can carry around 4GB of disk storage in my pocket.

I find it staggering that I can buy a disk drive with a credit card that could comfortably store 95% of all the production Siebel OLTP databases I have encountered.

from beyond the grave

Stumbled across this blog. Another young life ended prematurely. Sad. Very sad.

rising from the ashes

I forgot to pack my WordPress hosted images when moving my blog. Thankfully, this isn't as important (or embarrassing) as carefully packing and then promptly forgetting your suitcase when attending a week long conference away from home. However, thanks to the Google image archive, my photo blog has now been restored to its full glory. Yesterday, I visited a customer in sunny Glasgow, near Scotland. This was very poor planning on my part. I really should have delayed this trip by 7 days which would have allowed me to gatecrash the Oracle blogger meet-up at UKOUG. In addition, returning to Glasgow on Tuesday 21 November would have given me the opportunity to watch Celtic play United in a atmospheric Glasgow hostelry sharing a pint of 'heavy' with some friendly Scottish people. Anyway, it's all about the customer so I flew up yesterday. As I landed, I saw a small charter plane on the runway, ferrying a group of Scottish Oracle bloggers to Birmingham. I knew it was a group of Oracle DBA's from the name of the airline. When I arrived at the office, the client was having a theme week to coincide with 'I'm a (C-list) Celebrity. Get me out of here.' The lifts were out of action and you had to clamber up a large beanstalk to get to the meeting room on the fourth floor. Scaling the beanstalk was quite a challenge and you had to acrobatically leap onto a slippery white pole before finally reaching the balcony. This task delayed the start of the architecture workshop by two hours but the view from the top was well worth it. We then adjourned for a delightful lunch of widgety grubs, fish eyes and kangaroo testicles. Strange people, the Scots.

a picture

...is worth a thousand words, particularly when annotated.

so farewell then

  1. Steve Irwin - You had a passion for wildlife that truly brought it alive.
  2. Andre Agassi - You sobbed uncontrollably on a tennis court.