Life After Coffee

Another nice little bit of recognition showed up in my inbox recently… Blogged.com has rated Life After Coffee an 8.0 in the category of Technology Blogs!

OK, so 8.0 isn’t the greatest rating ever, but given that they take into account relevance of content (relevant to what I don’t know) and frequency of updates (there is no April) I’m pretty happy with it.

Now, if you’re interested in the best technology blogs around, check out their Technology Blog Directory. Many of the top picks are focused, professional blogs, not like the crap you’ll find here. There’s some great stuff to check out though and in general I would agree with their rankings.

Here’s a nice surprise that came up last month (and unfortunately I’ve been too busy to write about it until this month,) I’ve been presented with an Oracle ACE award! What is it? In the Oracle ACE Program FAQ it’s described like this:

The Oracle ACE Program is designed to recognize and reward members of the Oracle Technology and Applications communities for their contributions to those communities. These individuals are technically proficient (when applicable) and willingly share their knowledge and experiences.

The program comprises two levels: Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE Director. The former designation is Oracle’s way of saying “thank you” to community contributors for their efforts; we (and the community) appreciate their enthusiasm. The latter designation is for community enthusiasts who not only share their knowledge (usually in extraordinary ways), but also want to increase their community advocacy and work more proactively with Oracle to find opportunities for the same. In this sense, Oracle ACE is “backward looking” and Oracle ACE Director is “forward looking.”

The ACE award seems like a great way to recognize and encourage people to contribute to the Oracle community as a whole. ACE directors additionally commit to being involved in their local Oracle community, posting to the Oracle forums and a handful of other community-centric activities.

There are currently 159 people in the Oracle ACE program and if you frequently surf for Oracle information you’ll recognize many of the names (e.g. Doug Burns, Steve Karam and Tom Kyte, just to name a few.) I’m thrilled and honored to be part of the program and plan to keep contributing where I can!

oracle, oracle ACE, database, database administration, dba

We all get email forwards and, love them or hate them, many of them are damned funny! If you’re like me you hate the interruption that a constant flow of forwards bring along with the foolish chain letters and other garbage that typically come along with it.

Enter DeesInBox.com. Dee handpicks the best forwards to post on DeesInBox.com including jokes, stories, funny videos and pictures.

The site is great! You can go to the site anytime you need a little distraction (instead of being distracted when others send you forwards,) follow along through RSS, leave comments, and if you really must send something to all your friends, you can send a link instead of forwarding bunches of pictures.

Check out DeesInBox.com any time you need a good laugh or to catch up on the latest jokes, forwards and viral videos.

spam, funny, fun, forward, email, humor, video, viral video

I make no secret of the point that I love the webcomic xkcd and if I blogged every strip I like I would basically end up mirroring the entire comic here.

With that in mind, there is no way I could pass up posting this commic:

Next time someone asks you what a SQL injection is you can point them at this, then explain nicely.

sql, oracle, pl/sql, plsql, exploit, security, sql exploit, dba, database, database administration, comic, fun, funny, sql injection

The Boston Globe reports that a little more than a week ago Symantec Corp. made public a major loss of data from Monster.com. While the stolen information does not include social security numbers or other banking information there is real concern that email addresses from Monster.com will not only be sold to spammers, but will be used in phishing scams.

Read the full article and followup from the Boston Globe.

Monster.com has decided to notify users of this breach by mail. That’s snail mail. Now, I don’t know about you, but my mailing address on Monster.com is far from up to date, so I think it’s important that we spread the word online!

Thanks to Joe at JVT Advisors for sending this on to me.

job, job search, monster, monster.com, data security, security