Dune…

I’ve been a fan of the film Dune for ages. I also liked the TV mini series. The Children of Dune TV mini series was a bit too random for me. A remake of Dune is in the offing. With that in mind it is a little surprising to me that I’ve never got round to reading the book until now.

I think it’s safe to say I loved it. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve read in ages. Watching the film and TV series did not spoil it for me in the slightest, and quite unusually, reading the book has not lessened my love of the film.

The characters are brilliant. There is a lot of wisdom in the book too. In a previous post I mentioned one quote. I could pick out loads that are incredibly well observed and interesting. It ticks so many of the boxes for me I’m just sad there are not more of the same quality. Having discussed this book with some of the Oakies, they’ve advised me the rest in the series are pretty bad and the books written by his son are terrible. I’m not sure if I will read more, because I’m not sure I want to risk the disappointment. I’ll think on it.

I’m moving on to Cold Days now. Go Harry!

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG 2012

The UKOUG 2012 conference was a rather short affair for me this year as I was only there for 1 day of it.

During the Sunday I was at my nephew’s birthday party. In the evening I returned to Birmingham in time to make it to the Oracle ACE dinner. Big thanks to Debra Lilley for organizing it and to the Oracle ACE program for sponsoring the event. I used the opportunity to ask a number of questions about ADF and WebLogic. I’m still a newbie and since I seem unable to distance myself from the subject, I figured I need to know a bit more. 🙂

Monday was my first and only day at the conference. The lineup was like this:

My presentation was a quick romp through a number of the big performance mistakes people make in PL/SQL. The presentation felt like it went well. I guess the evaluation results will reveal all. I’ve already got some good feedback from it and I spent the best part of an hour answering questions after it, so those people must have thought my opinions were worth something. 🙂 The link above points to a summary article of the presentation, with internal links to the details on all the sections I spoke about, plus a few more. There seems little point repeating the contents of those articles, so having this article as effectively a links page to them seems the most obvious solution.

In addition to the presentations, I got to hook up with lots of friends from the Oracle circuit. You sometimes feel like a social butterfly at these things, but that’s kinda nice. I also got to introduce some of my work colleagues to a number of influential people, which kinda made me feel important for a few minutes. 🙂

Then it was back home to shave off my Mo and cut my hair, then out to the Oak Table dinner. I got to the restaurant about 11 minutes late, but early compared to the rest of the Oakies. 🙂 During dinner we discussed a number of things including load balancing WebLogic, movies, novels and annoying people who push into queues. It was all dead technical. 🙂

And that was that. Short and sweet.

Cheers

Tim…

Movember is (nearly) over…

Movember is officially over, but I’ve got to keep my Mo for a couple more days. Some people have promised donations as long as this thing is still on my face on Monday at UKOUG 2012.

It started off as fun, but now it’s a bit of an itchy nightmare. I can’t wait for Monday evening so I can see the back of it!

Thanks to everyone who donated some cash. I’m sure the relevant charities will very much appreciate your contributions!

I’ll report the final total once I know what it is, and I’ve added my donation to it.

Cheers

Tim…