Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

Well I guess I have officially  joined the cool crowd since I am now the proud poppa of a bouncing baby MAC.

The best things about it so far are:

1. It runs windows so I still have a safety net if I get to feeling totally lost. I’m using VMWare which allows me to jump back and forth.
2. It runs some flavor of unix as it’s operating system. (so I can run top, ps, sar, etc… – it’ BSD but it beats the crap out of DOS)
3. It’s about a million pounds lighter and half the size of my old Sony laptop.
4. It’s faster than my old laptop.
5. At 4G, it’s got 4 times the memory my old laptop had.
6. The video iChat thing is pretty cool.
7. It’s the worlds biggest iPod.

It is pretty cool but I just hate the process of going from one machine to another. Even without the frustration of the keyboard changes that the Mac inflicts, changing just makes for some amount of unproductive time. I have to do a presentation next week in Fort Worth at an Oracle Technology Luncheon thing (here’s a link to the presentation: 11g Advanced Features) So anyway, I am working on the Power Point slides using the MAC and it makes me feel like I’m typing with mittens on. I’m sure that will get better over time. I am finding that there are a lot of options with this setup though. Almost everything I am doing can be done in more than one way. Like I can do my calendar stuff in MS Office or in iCal (or on my phone for that matter).  

I have to admit that old laptop was starting to have a lot of problems. Wireless was flakey, it would freeze every other day or so, and last week the keyboard quit working. Kind of reminded me of the PC/MAC commercial where the PC was sick.

Anyway, so far so good. Now if I can just figure out how to make the F11 key work in windows instead of turning on the speaker I should be in good shape.

Kerry Osborne

So I decided to finally join the 21^st century. For the past several years I haven’t listened to any music to speak of. The radio went fuzzy in my car about three years ago and since I have a high tolerance for pain and was basically always busy doing things that were more important to me, I never got it fixed. Also, I moved a couple of years ago and still haven’t hooked up any sort of stereo at the new house. So this year I got a new car with a working radio. It’s one of those Toyota FJ cruisers that look like the old Land Cruisers.

Toyota FJ Cruiser

It was a demo unit that the dealership had put a fancy radio / GPS system in. I really only bought it for the radio. It was pretty expensive for a radio, but it has a nice blue paint job and doesn’t take up any space in the new house. But I digress, the fancy unit in the dash has AM/FM and satellite (XM) radio, a cd player, a DVD player, blue tooth phone integration, traffic information, and a griddle for making french toast while you’re driving. You know, basically everything the 21^st century has to offer. It even has a hard disk recorder that can automatically record CD’s while you’re playing them so you can play the songs later in case you loose the CD I guess. Oh, and the ability to load up your own image files to display when you reach a favorite location (remember the GPS) or just for a pretty background while listening to the radio. The best part about it is the XM radio though. Of course I can’t hear it if I go in a parking garage or if it gets really cloudy, because it looses reception, but other than that it’s great. No commercials, except for XM’s own plugs for themselves, but that’s to be expected. No harm in a little self-promotion I guess. Although, you’d think the people hearing the ads would already be subscribers.

Anyway, after a few years of not listening to any music I found out that I really like listening to the stuff on the way to and from work. For several weeks I’d come busting into the office and grab the first person I’d see and tell them about the cool music I heard on the way to work. Usually they would take the ear buds out of their ears and then give me that look like I was from another planet. I imagine it’s the look Rip Van Winkle got after his 20 year nap. After a while I stopped telling people about it and just kept the joy to myself.

Here’s a picture of one of my co-workers who’s pissed because he had to take his ear buds out to listen to me drone on about music.

While I was at it I decided to buy an ipod. Wow! It’s a lot better than the Walkman I had back in the 80’s! My new car stereo let me hook it up so I could control it and play it through the system. So I basically keep it in the glove box all the time. I mostly listen to it when I’m in a garage, or it’s really cloudy, or when I can’t find anything good on the 170 or so stations provided by the satellite radio guys. Or when I just have a particular song or artist I want to listen to, but that doesn’t happen that often.

Anyway, now that I have joined the 21^st century from a music stand point, I decided that maybe I should check out this blog thing. At first I didn’t see much that interested me, but lately I have started to see some value in it. I plan on mainly using it for work related stuff. I work for a small consulting company that focuses on Oracle databases (Enkitec) and I am fortunate to get to work on interesting things (for me anyway) on a fairly regular basis. I’m hoping this blog will provide a convenient way to share some of the stuff that I’ve learned and get some feedback as well. So, here’s to the 21^st century.