Month: July 2005

Looks like we finally got hit in London (UK).

For the latest information take a look at the BBC News.

Not good!

The UK’s popularity is pretty low at the moment. We really need this Olympics to rebuild some of the bridges we’ve burnt recently. I hope we don’t mess it up!

Cheers

Tim…

I’ll start this post by stating the few facts:

• I’m not a major Star Wars fan. I’ve watched all the films, but I’m certainly not a geek about them.
• I played with Lego as a kid, but it’s not my thing now, unless I’m playing with my nephew.
• I don’t own a webcam. Actually I can’t think of anything worse than seeing moving pictures of myself on the net.

That said, I think this link is really cool: Lego Start Destroyer

I just think it’s really funny. Imagine the scene, it’s midnight and you decide to build an enormous Lego model of a star destroyer that takes you 10 hours to complete. On top of that you decide to film it using your webcam to create a time-lapse recording of the event for the world to see. Fantastic!

I love technology 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

I’ve just noticed that Robert Freeman has removed the ability to add comments to his blog and may stop blogging altogether, see his post entitled Removal of comments…

I hope he’s able to carry on blogging. I think it’s good to hear a variety of opinions and I like to read peoples off-topic posts as they give an idea of the personality behind the blog.

Cheers

Tim…

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Another year older and supposedly another year wiser.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I seem to have missed a few years between 18 and 36. Where did they go and what was I doing? It’s all a blur.

I was sure that Larry was going to release Oracle 10g Release 2 in time for my birthday!

I’m off to hit the books.

Cheers

Tim…

How well do we as Oracle professionals cope on the worldwide stage?

I was struggling to answer a question on my forum yesterday. My gut reaction was that both the question and answer were simple, but I seemed incapable of grasping the issue. The reason for my difficulty was that English was not the first language of the person asking the question. This made me feel guilty on a couple of levels:

• I’m a bit ashamed of the fact I can’t speak another language. I was terrible at French and German at school and two years of Japanese lessons left me in a position where all I can do is count to 10 and introduce myself. Not a massive return on my investment 🙂
• I could imagine the frustration on the part of the other person. A newcomer to Oracle has enough to deal with, without having to cope with a language barrier on top of everything else.

This got me thinking about how we in the English speaking Oracle world must be percieved on the world stage.

I did a quick scan on the net and found a Population by Country breakdown. When you take a look at the numbers you’ll see that in comparison to China and India most countries seem relatively insignificant in population terms. Both these countries have recently seen a boom in their IT industries to the point where they are fast becoming IT superpowers. With that in mind, our myopic view of the IT industry seems very much like being a big fish in a small pond.

In actual fact, the IT industry is more than aware of this fact. So much so that even a certain company with the motto “Don’t be evil.” thinks nothing of censoring its content to get its foot in the door. Of course, they’re not the only people at it:

• Google goes to China
• Microsoft deletes ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in China

To return to my initial questions:

• Are we big fish in a small pond? I think so.
• How well do we as Oracle professionals cope on the worldwide stage? Not so well.

I would be interested to know the reactions of people on both sides of the debate. If English is not your first language do you feel left out in the cold, or have you come to accept that English is a prerequisite in the IT industry?

Cheers

Tim…