I Am Now Intrepid

I dumped Windows for good back in July and have been running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on my Dell since then. I love Open Source, and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed running Ubuntu. I’ve found it to be on par with XP for stability and superior in usability. Before you quibble with the stability… Read More

A Posse, I Has One

The sadly unfortunate and untimely death of one of our own has me waxing philosophically about our “community”. Those of us who blog about Oracle (or even just blog in general) form a loosely-coupled community of like-minded individuals, i.e. we don’t agree on everything, but we can all agree that blogging is important. I’m impressed… Read More

Remember Music Videos?

My latest Intertubes distraction comes courteousy of MTV. Hard to believe, considering how far out of their core demographic I am, and yet here we are. Anyway, the network rolled out MTV Music earlier this week. It’s an archive of music videos, remember those? MTV infamously strayed away from playing videos in favor of reality… Read More

We Miss You Carl

Carl Backstrom died in a single car accident early Sunday morning. He was 35. Earlier today, the news trickled through several of our Twitter feeds, as a nurse involved attempted to find and notify Carl’s friends. Carl was an avid APEX evangelist and blogger, snowboarder and generally well-liked, nice guy. Carl read this blog and… Read More

Firefox Still Pwns the Field

Generally, I prefer choice in software. Intertubes browser is no different. However, in this particular category, I am an unabashed Firefox fanboy. I’ve been using it since 0.8, and it hasn’t let me down yet. I’ve tried the field, both for personal and professional purposes: Chrome, Opera, Flock, Safari, IE (all versions, 3-8), Netscape/Mosaic, even… Read More

WhereCamp PDX Roundup

This weekend was WhereCamp PDX here in Portland. WhereCamp is another Bay Area-born unconference imported here by the great folks at Legion of Tech As you can probably guess, WhereCamp focuses on geo-geeking. It began in 2007 as a way to extend and build on conversations and topics presented at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference. There’s… Read More

Another Reason to Network

The layoff parade continued this week with cuts announced by several companies. I won’t call out all the names; you can find them listed on Techmeme pretty quickly. Having been riffed twice during the dot-com era, I cringe whenever I hear about layoffs. For me, getting laid off was a lasting lesson that forever changed… Read More

The Complicator’s Gloves

Thanks to Chet “for great” Justice, a.k.a. ORACLENERD, for passing along this gem from the Daily WTF. Alex Papadimoulis lists three types of developers attacking good software development, the Amateurs, the Career Amateurs and the Complicators. The Complicators are the focus of the post; I love the description: They’ve acquired a sort of sixth-sense: the… Read More

Communities Exchange Recap

The Communities Exchange conference wraps up today. I spoke yesterday and then bailed to meet a previous commitment today. This was an interesting conference, unlike any I’ve attended. For starters, there were only 45 attendees, small by design. Also a surprise to me, most of the 45 attending were from out-of-state, including several from overseas,… Read More

Low Tech Wins

So, I’m speaking at the Communities Exchange conference in San Jose today, filling in for Paul. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since he announced last week that he couldn’t make it. Hence the lack of content here. Anyway, looks to be an interesting conference, only 45 attendees, small on purpose. I hope to… Read More