Monday 3 December Get up very early and drive to Birmingham. 09:40-10:30 ‘30 years at Oracle’ - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte’s excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker. 10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of ‘spot the colleague’ and ask 27 different companies ‘How can XYZ help me grow my business ?’ 11:15-12:00 ‘Siebel Keynote’ - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert....
I decided to save Oracle Corporation lots of money by not attending Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Initially, my manager spent a lot of time trying to dissuade me but as soon as he uttered the words ‘Billy Joel’ and ‘Prince’, I immediately volunteered for some billable work in Sunderland to help pay for Doug’s complimentary red sleeping bags. Doug Burns, Tim Hall and John Scott seem to have a real problem conquering jet lag while Mark Rittman just does ’the British thing and goes down the pub’....
I thought it would be interesting to analyze the number of postings by month from 1997 to August 2007 to the Usenet newsgroup comp.databases.oracle.server. However, I was wrong.
Oracle 11g has recently been released so it’s time for everyone to submit their colourful screenshots into the ‘Oracle 11g banner version’ competition. Well, nearly everyone. Apologies for the delay but, finally, I am proud to present my paltry, monochrome effort. I just installed Oracle 11g onto a VMware server running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.0. It actually took me more time to configure VMware tools and successfully share the folder staging the distribution than to install and configure Oracle....
Today, a gentleman approached me and politely asked if he could ask me a question. Normally, this dialog is a little more protracted and goes as follows: ‘Excuse me. Is your name Norman Brightside ?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you work for Siebel ?’ ‘Yes.’ (although strictly I work for Oracle on the Siebel CRM product) ‘Are you from Expert Services ?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you mind if I ask you a quick question ?...
I own up. It’s a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses. May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul. Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of ‘any guesses’, all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system:...
This Bluehost powered blog is now FastCGI enabled. You may find the site faster but, then again, hyperlinks may return completely random articles. You will probably struggle to tell the difference. Which reminds me of a funny story… I am currently working in the North East on an ’escalation’. An ’escalation’ is characterised by frequent, lengthy conference calls with bi-hourly status updates, the phrases ‘high-profile’, ‘alternative technical solutions’, ‘severe degradation’, ‘impacting the bottom line’, ‘CIO visibility’, ‘options for the weekend’ and the perennial favourite: ‘any progress yet ?...
You never press ‘Publish’ any more When I read your feed There’s no articles like before In your blog You’re trying hard not to show it But baby, baby I know it You’ve lost that blogging feeling Oh, that blogging feeling You’ve lost that blogging feeling Now it’s gone, gone, gone Oh Tom Now there’s no comments In your blog when I read you And Tom you’re forgetting to comment...
…lies in your hands, dear reader. Another baby when my wife is 57 years old ? - discuss. My job title when I joined Siebel in April 2003 was ‘Junior Architecture Specialist’. Four years later, it transpires that I am now officially entitled to call myself ‘Principal Architecture Specialist’. However, I have elected not to change my business cards and .signature as I am simply not worthy. Please remember that I have worked with some very talented individuals (past and present)....
Dust off that blogroll. Highlight your best technical posts. Update that photo in the ‘About’ tab. Polish the colours on your theme. Prime the hit counter and prepare for an invasion from the Web 2.0 ‘A’ listers. Justin Kestelyn (Oracle Technical Network) sparked some an interesting and though provoking discussion when he puzzled over the relatively low profile of Oracle Corporation in the Web 2.0 community. Robert Scoble picked up the thread (twice) and there are some interesting comments....