Category: Blogs

About blogs and blogging.

Making your online presence speak for you

Recently I have been asked to become a contributor to the Internet Evolution blog. My first article there, Making Your Online Presence Speak for You discusses how things like forum contributions, an online resume and a personal website (like this one) can have act as an extension of your resume.

In a Web 2.0 era where a prospective employer is more likely to Google your name than to check your references, what is your online presence saying about you?

A surprising number of people still seem to fall into one of two categories when it comes to posting their profiles online: they either indiscriminately post everything about their lives, blissfully ignorant of how it may affect them in the future, or they avoid putting their name on anything online, blissfully ignorant of how an online presence could help them. If you fall into either of these categories it may be time for a change.

Check out the full article on www.internetevolution.com and join in the great discussion on the topic.

Blogged.com rates Life After Coffee an 8.0!


Life After Coffee at BloggedAnother 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.

I receive an Oracle ACE award!

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

All the forwards you could ever ask for at DeesInBox.com

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

Where’s my cardboard laptop?

Don Burleson points out that Oracle has sent out some Cardboard laptops!

Oracle cardboard laptop


The outside of the laptop which showed up in Andy Armstrong’s mail July 5th read “We’ve taken the idea that the outside world is a dangerous place for unprotected content.” and the inside reads “And shredded it.”

Thanks to Zach for posting the full text of the interior which reads:

“To derive maximum benefit from your business critical content, you need to share it across a wide user base. But the more people who have access to it, the greater the threat of sensitive information leaking to your competitors. That’s just for starters; content proliferation also raises the risk of regulatory non-compliance and escalating management costs. You know you can’t live without your information, but you’d be forgiven for wondering how to live with it.

Oracle’s recently acquired Information Rights Management solution can help. A key component of our Document and Records Management portfolio, it enables you to share your information when and with whom you want – without fear of the outside world.

But it doesn’t stop there. Should the worst happen – and your laptop falls into unsafe hands – we can even scamble your content before anyone works out how to access it.

We’ll be in touch shortly with more details of how to shred your content management worries.”

So what’s the story? What bandwagon is Oracle getting on here? Only time will tell. Burleson thinks it may be another step in their “unbreakable” theme. I think it may be something with Application Express as a content management system. Something to do with enterprise blogs or wiki or some other web 2.0 kind of content management.

wiki, blog, web, web20, web 2.0, oracle, dba, rdbms, dbms, marketing, laptop