More sightseeing, then home…

I’ve got another morning of sightseeing, then I fly home this afternoon.

I’m going to write a post summing up my Vienna experience, but for now all I will say is I love Vienna. I spent the whole day walking round checking out the center of the city. Later in the day my dodgy knee felt a bit sore, so I did what any sane person would do and went ice skating in a park. 🙂 The weather has been great so far. I got a bit sun burnt yesterday, which isn’t bad considering I was expecting 6-10 degrees and rain… 🙂

I feel totally at home here. Pity I have to leave…

Cheers

Tim…

Teaching mode off, holiday mode on…

I’ve just finished my second day of teaching Oracle PL/SQL Tuning. I’m now switching into holiday mode for a couple of days before returning to the UK.

Everything went well, but I’m sure over the next couple of days I’ll start to think about things I’ll do differently next time. It will be interesting to see the summary of the student appraisal forms. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

The night before…

It’s the night before the first day of my Oracle PL/SQL Tuning workshop in Vienna. The flights were on time and pretty straight forward. I had a two hour stay at Dusseldorf airport, which was quite pleasant.

I’ve not seen much of Austria yet, but I can say it has a fantastic infrastructure. Everything looks so solid and well constructed. I’m looking forward to seeing a bit more over the next few days…

Cheers

Tim…

Welcome to the universe…

A little over a year ago I wrote a rather miserable post about the departure of one of my friends for New Zealand. Thanks to the wonders of Skype we’ve managed to keep in touch, despite the time difference.

This morning he called to say he was now a father, so I would like to take a moment to formally welcome Ruby Lukic to the universe…

I have been applying some pressure during conversations about names. I was suggesting “Tim” if it was a boy, or “Tim” if it was a girl, but it seems my suggestions have been ignored. Although the middle name is still undecided, so there’s hope… 🙂

I can’t wait to get down to New Zealand later in the year…

Cheers

Tim…

11g bits and bobs…

I’ve just released an article covering the Miscellaneous New Features section of the OCP upgrade exam. It contains a rather random assortment of stuff including:

  • Online Table Redefinition Enhancements
  • Enhanced Finer Grained Dependency Management
  • DDL With the WAIT Option (DDL_LOCK_TIMEOUT)
  • Invisible Indexes
  • Query Result Cache
  • Adaptive Cursor Sharing
  • Temporary Tablespace Enhancements

I was toying with the idea of putting each section out as separate articles, but they’re all pretty small soundbites, so I thought I would be better to stick with grouping in the OCP syllabus.

Cheers

Tim…

Jumper…

I went to see Jumper last night. I was a little disappointed because I thought it was a film about knitting… 🙂

I read some reviews saying it was shocking, so I had suitably low expectations, which meant I was pleasantly surprised. It was quite fun. If you like the idea of jump through worm-holes at will and thought Nightcrawler from X2 was cool, you are going to like this. If you think it’s a load of fanciful nonsense then you’ll hate it.

As noted in his previous outings, Hayden Christensen is a bit wooden. Jamie Bell was OK, but he had a few lines which I can only assume were English because I couldn’t understand them. Samuel L. Jackson is great as always. Even when he’s bad he’s good. 🙂

Expect nothing and you’ll enjoy it. Expect something special and you’ll walk out dissapointed.

Cheers

Tim…

Work and distractions…

Work:

A little over 2 years ago the company I work for was taken over and since then I’ve been trying to decide if there is a place for me in the new organization. In the back of my mind I knew there wasn’t, but the path of least resistance is so tempting. 🙂 Yesterday I was forced to make a decision, and I will be leaving in August. That means I will be unemployed when I’m at OpenWorld this year, so if you seem me throw me a couple of coppers for a cup of tea… 🙂

I don’t have any plans for what comes next, and to be honest I have no intention of making any until the end of the year.

Distractions: 

I’ve not done a great deal of writing for the website recently. One of the reasons is I’ve been writing and rehearsing a 2 day PL/SQL tuning workshop that I’m presenting in Austria and Denmark soon. It’s been an interesting process, but it has taken quite a bit of time. Rehearsing a 12 hour workshop takes a big chunk out of what little spare time I have. 12 hours to be precise. 🙂

Another big distraction is Web 2.0. I think it’s safe to say I’ve been seduced by all things Web 2.0, which means I’m spending much of my spare time doing rather random, but fun, stuff.

Over time these distractions will fall by the way and I’ll get back to writing more. If nothing else, I must sort out the 11gR1 new features before 11gR2 is launched… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Random stuff…

After a few days off with an annoying cold, I’m back in action. I’ve got a Karate course this weekend and I’m not really feeling up for it, but I have to go or I’m not allowed to go to any others for the rest of the year. If you miss selection the year is totaled! 🙁 I’m going to use the wonder drug that is Lemsip to get me through it. 🙂

I added SnapShots to my blog and my aggregator. I like having the preview, rather than having to click on every link to see what it’s pointing to. They are configurable so if they annoy you you can switch them off. I guess most people read this blog via the RSS feed, so it won’t make a difference anyway.

I’ve been messing about with loads of Web 2.0 stuff recently, but today I’ve actually done some tidying up. I closed my StumbleUpon and MySpace accounts. I’ve not used StumbleUpon for ages and now it’s grown into another social network site it seemed pointless keeping it. I’ve never used my MySpace account, so closing it is no big deal.

Cheers

Tim…