Panels Experiment

I’m going to try an experiment on all of you. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt, much. I’ve just installed Panels, which is a newly launched beta service, on this blog. Panels adds, well, panels to your blog links. From their blog: With the addition of panels to your site/blog your readers are given all the… Read More

Mix: Year One

Mix is one year old today. Seems like it’s been around forever, at least to me, but you’ll recall we launched it to very little fanfare at the beginning of OpenWorld 2007. Mix didn’t really get much promotion at all until Marketing decided to solicit session ideas from the community for OpenWorld 2008 back in… Read More

Get Satisfaction’s Ads

I found this nugget in Paul’s Google Reader Shared Items feed: “Get Satisfaction Launches Socialized Ad Policy“. As previously documented here, we like what Get Satisfaction does, and even though ads usually put me right into a coma, my curiosity about how ads could be “smart” (from Paul’s note in Reader) overcame me. Turns out… Read More

Defrag Debrief: Monday

Looks like I got out of Denver right before a cold front came through, dropping the temperature significantly. Not that the weather is all that great here in Portland. So, Paul and I were at Defrag Monday and Tuesday, as was Bob, who has done a good job of recapping in near real time. Overall,… Read More

Defrag08 Presentation

Defrag 08: Is that Good? View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_networking oracle) I presented the above at Defrag 08′ in Denver yesterday.  The idea was to take some known concepts around understanding networks and apply them to how we manage a community.  This is new ground for us at the lab, but… Read More

Celebrating Carl’s Life

As Joel announced yesterday, Carl’s family will be holding a memorial service to celebrate his life Thursday, November 6 in Riverside, California. In lieu of flowers the family has set up a Memorial Fund in behalf of Carl’s daughter, Destany. Donations to Carl’s Memorial Fund can be by domestic or international wire transfer or by… Read More

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