Life After Coffee

There’s another great review on Amazon for my book Oracle Shell Scripting today.

Here’s what J. Westergaard “Oracle DBA” says about Oracle Shell Scripting:

I found this to be a good book. It was a quick and easy read, I read the whole thing in about a week. The subject matter was a bit simpler then I had expected, yet it filled in some of the basic details that the more advanced books just skip over. This is was a great book for beginning unix shell scripting.

J. highlights one of the books biggest strengths: it presents as complete a picture as possible of basic yet powerful shell scripting commands. Thanks J!

Check out my book Oracle Shell Scripting, only $34.95 from Rampant TechPress.

Buy it now!

It’s now 2008. Go figure. 2007 seems to have been busy for me. I finished my second book which is now “>Amazon.com and many local book stores. I’m really enjoying doing remote database administration from home and in July I took a team manager position which is keeping me quite busy.

For the past few weeks I’ve been busy with an on-site visit to one of my favorite clients in Maryland, a database health-check for another client (which makes for a quite demanding week) and some much needed vacation. The highlight of the past few weeks (other than having some great time off with my family and friends) was being presented an Oracle ACE award.

I have quite a backlog of topics to write about and will be working on getting a few articles up here each week as soon as I can find the time. For now I’m off to San Diego, CA for a conference, as soon as it stops snowing long enough to get a flight out of New Hampshire.

Happy new year everyone!

It’s funny, you wouldn’t think a dress made of thousands of condoms would be a pretty thing, but the overall effect is quite stunning!

Art MoCo offers some explanation of why the artist Adriana Bertini creates these amazing dresses:

The Brazilian artist started creating fashions out of condoms to highlight the need to look at the prophylactics as basics, so that we would don them as easily as a pair of jeans. Some of her dresses use thousands of condoms; one wedding dress took almost 80,000 (and to think, some people hesitate over using just one!).

condom, sex, safe sex, birth control, prophylactic

The webcomic xkcd is so good I have to resist the urge to blog just about every strip, but the latest one is just too good not to share.

This of course applies not only to programmers, but sys-admins and DBAs as well. I mean really, some of those Oracle installs take a long time!

slacker, technology, compile, programming, code, excuse

Cold enough at the Mount Washington Observatory that boiling water tossed in the air turns to snow instantly!

How cold? -34.8F Yeah, that’s cold.

The video was done earlier today by the Mount Washington Observatory Staff. The observatory is like a fallout shelter on the top of the mountain with some weather gear strapped on top. The staff has been known to do some wacky videos before, but it’ll be a lot more fun now that they’re posting them online.

Check out Water to Snow Round 1 which was done at a mere 22 below but with the aid of a 75MPH wind! It’s probably worth mentioning that Mount Washington is the location of the strongest wind gust ever recorded at a hasty 231MPH.

snow, mount washington, mt washington, new hampshire, nh, weather