The Angry Geek

Tom Kyte is a world renowned Oracle expert – just look through his “Ask Tom” site for confirmation (half the questions seem to come from India). Despite his fame, I once changed his mind on an interesting topic – the best substitute for a Boolean data-type in Oracle -Ask Tom “Boolean Datatype”.  Okay, so it was a moment of crowning glory for me – but hey, I’m a geek – recognition from a famous geek (even fleeting) is worth a lot to me!

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Today did not start out well.  Possibly due to this cold (which I just can’t seem to shake) – or possibly due to staying up a little too late watching Spiderman (the animated series) – I completely slept through my first alarm, and therefore shut off and ignored my second alarm, assuming I’d be awoken again in half an hour…

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Does this scene seem familiar to anyone?

“Ow – she hit me!”
“Yeah, well he hit me first!”
“Only because she bit me before that!”
“Well he shouldn’t have taken my ‘My Little Pony’ – I told him I’d bite if he didn’t give it back”
“But she took my Action Man and made him ride around on her gay pink pony”

“ENOUGH – BOTH OF YOU!  I don’t care who did what to who – you’re both behaving like 3 year olds.  Grow up, the pair of you.  Sam, give Mary back her pony – and the head – and Mary, you give Sam back his toy soldier – wipe the lipstick off it first.  Right, you’re both grounded until you kiss and make up.”

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I manage the Support & Development department for the UK division of a fairly large multi-national corporation that provides Supply Chain solutions.  That’s not where I started though – I was originally hired as a code monkey, nothing more, and spent my first few years working for one particular customer developing customisations to our product to match their legacy requirements.

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Just for a moment, let’s pretend that this blog has tens – or even hundreds – of thousands of readers, all of whom are interested in buying a new car in the next 6 months.  Further, let’s pretend that all of these readers like and respect my opinion – maybe they’ve been reading the blog for years, and have come to trust me.  I know – it’s a hell of a stretch – but it’s always good to give your imagination a work-out now and again.

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Expatriates (see, I do know the right spelling) are people temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person’s upbringing or legal residence. The word comes from the Latin ex (out of) and patria (country, motherland).

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I hate the feeling when I can’t quite remember something. Not knowing the answer to something is quite frustrating, but worse still is knowing that I do know the answer, but I can’t pull it out of my head right now.  Everyone gets this – typically, it seems, with song lyrics; we all know songs well enough to sing along, but who can easily recall all Twelve Days of Christmas on demand?

As an aside, when I looked up that Wikipedia article, I also found a rather comical page that claims that the song is actually a collection of religious symbols.  Fortunately, Snopes leaped to the rescue to disprove that theory – but it just goes to show the kind of crap that exists on the Internet, masquerading as legitimate fact.

Hey now – that wasn’t supposed to be self-referential!

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