Month: June 2008

The Incredible Hulk…

Don’t assume The Incredible Hulk is a sequel to Ang Lee‘s Hulk from 2003, because it’s not. It completely ignores the story laid down in the previous film. It doesn’t replay the creation of the Hulk. You just get some idea of how it happened during the opening credits. The cast is completely different, and even the Hulk itself looks different.

I admit that Ang Lee’s version of the Hulk was a bit of a dog. Lots of textbook psychology and very little Hulk. Even so, it looked quite retro-cool with all the split screen stuff and the Hulk itself looked amazing, even if you didn’t see too much of him.

This version goes a long way to correcting those issues. For a start, I doubt many people go to see the Hulk expecting an epic and thoughtful story. I just want to switch my brain off and see a massive green thing running around and smashing things. I got plenty of that!

The Hulk itself looks cooler in this film. It’s a but less green, seems a bit shorter, but has certainly hit the gym and stuck to his diet. He’s completely shredded. 🙂

Edward Norton seemed a strange choice at first. After superb stuff like Fight Club and American History X, this just seemed a bit light weight, but he does a good job. Liv Tyler is acceptable, if a bit dull. Tim Roth is pretty cool. I don’t see enough of him these days…

At just short of 2 hours, the film was a little long. If it had been cut down to 90 minutes I think I would have enjoyed it more.

If mindless green thuggery is your bag, give this a go. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Possible linkup to another franchise at the end. Interesting… 😉

Soul Music and Interesting Times…

Rock and Roll is born on Discworld in Soul Music and Rincewind frees the Counterweight Continent in Interesting Times.

Although both books are pretty good, by the standards of previous offerings I felt they were a little flat. Maybe some of that is down to the manner in which I read them. Most of the previous books were read in comparatively few sittings. Maybe 50-100 pages at a time. These two books were read in chunks of about 10-20 pages at a time. I guess you lose some of the momentum when you are constantly starting and stopping. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Installfest and Downsizing…

Installfest

Tod Trichler from OTN sent me a mail this morning about a new Installfest section on the Oracle Wiki. I’m always a bit dubious about putting links to my content on the Oracle Wiki because it seems like a shameless plug, but this section of the Wiki actively encourages it, provided the links are relevant. If you are into Oracle on Linux try and get involved. 🙂

Downsizing

As part of our continuing assimilation a whole bunch of projects at work are being downsized at the moment. Many will run in a limited capacity before being shut down completely in the near future. As a result, I’m in the process of moving several databases from large, expensive and power hungry hardware to commodity hardware running Linux. In a couple of cases, applications are moving from RAC to single node databases.

It’s quite good fun installing loads of little boxes and transferring the data. Sometimes, having lots of little jobs to tick off the list is quite rewarding, although I’m sure it will get very old very fast. 🙂

While sitting running some Red Hat updates I found myself saying, “I love Linux!”, to a colleague. I can’t tell you exactly why. It just has the right combination of ease of use and geek appeal all rolled into one. I work with Oracle a variety of platforms (Tru64, Windows, Linux) here, an I’ve used a whole bunch more in previous jobs, but I think Linux ticks most of the boxes for me.

Cheers

Tim…

Pink Eye…

Pinkeye

I woke up today with a bloodshot eye producing what could loosely be described as eye-snot. This made me think of the Pink Eye episode on South Park. Next thing I know I’m reading Jake’s post, which had a picture of Cartman on it. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

In honor of this, I’m including a picture of Chef doing the Thriller number in the Pink Eye episode, where the town is ravaged by a pink eye outbreak that turns everyone into zombies.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m off to turn the whole of Birmingham into zombies… 🙂

Getting into the swing of normal life…

I’m back from Tallinn and I’m now trying to get back into normal life. These trips make you feel important for a couple of days before crashing back to reality… 🙂

My sightseeing went well. “Old Town” at the centre of the city looks really cool and has a nice vibe. Cobbled roads, fancy churches, lots of cool looking buildings and big stone walls all over the place. It’s nice just to meander through the streets. I was lucky enough to be there during a festival, so there were bands of all styles playing on stages in the street. Outside of Old Town, the city is much like any European city. The same sort of shops and activities you would expect to see in any modern city. I certainly wouldn’t feel out of place living there.

I checked out the cost of food, clothing and electrical items in the shops and it seemed pretty much in line with UK costs, so I guess the American tourists thought it was very expensive.

If I had planned my sightseeing, I think I could have covered the main tourist areas of the city in the first couple of evenings (the days were very long) and the final half day, which would have left a whole day to get out of the city and check out the surrounding towns. As it was, I didn’t plan anything so I stayed in the city. 🙂

So overall, Tallinn get’s a big thumbs up from me. For those not familiar with the term “thumbs up“, that means I liked it. 🙂

Now I have to get back in the swing of real life… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Estonia Day 2 Update…

I’ve just finished the second day of teaching in Estonia…

I didn’t have any database issues today, which was a relief. Everything went according to plan, but it was a struggle to get all the information across in the time. I think I’ve got more than 13 hours of material and only 12 hours to present it in, but I can’t really see what I can remove without missing out something important.

As it was, I managed to get through everything, but I did need and extra 45 minutes. 🙂

I enjoy doing these 2 day sessions, but they are extremely draining. Anyone who knows me will find this hard to believe, but it’s really hard work to talk for 12+ hours in 2 days. I’m not sure I could cope with teaching a 5 day course, or teaching every week. I take my hat off to anyone who is a full time trainer, because it’s a very difficult job…

So now I’ve got a couple of days sightseeing before I head home. I had a quick walk round the city last night and it looks really cool. The weather is great and the days are so long it’s unreal.

I think I’m going to head off to the hotel gym to do some yoga, the go and have another look round the city before I start my proper sightseeing tomorrow.

Cheers

Tim…

Estonia Day 1 Update…

I’ve just completed day 1 of my PL/SQL workshop in Estonia. The first few minutes proved especially eventful!

When I did my workshop in Copenhagen, I had a lot of trouble with the projector. This morning I plugged the projector into my laptop and all was well. I even made a joke about how well it was going. Little did I know…

I started the presentation and the first demo hung! I don’t think I can fully describe the panic that sets in when something like that happens withing a couple of minutes of starting a 2 day workshop. It’s like a little piece of you dies. 🙂 I did a little messing around to try and get it working, but quickly realised I had to keep things going or it was going to get really boring, really quickly, so I just rebooted the virtual machine.

Lookily, wiser men than me (Andrew Clarke and Mark Rittman) had warned me long ago about the dangers of live demos, so I always carry a backup plan. I had text representations and screen shots of the expected output from the demos, so I used those while I waited for the VM to restart. After a little while the VM was up again and was working fine, so with more than a small sigh of relief, things were back on track.

I wonder what fate will throw at me tomorrow. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, or gives you a heart attack…

You gotta laugh…

Cheers

Tim…