Loey and her Dad: Stars at 1871 Grand Opening

Chris won a commission to create a mural, in collaboration with his friend Dan Ezra Lang, at 1871, a new "incubator" for startups here in Chicago (1871.com). Very high profile initiative and big feather in Chris's cap to have gotten the commission.

CONGRATULATIONS, CHRIS!

1871 threw a big grand opening celebration last night and Chris put us on the guest list to attend.

Loey was easily the most beautiful and amazing baby at the party. Also, so far we could tell, the only baby or child there altogether. Mostly it was crammed full of a bunch of potential investors in suits and software coders in t-shirts with the names of their websites prominently displayed.

You can see both Chris's mural and many pictures of lovely Loey here. But here are some highlights:

Lovely Pink Loey

The mural (or most of it)

A close up:

Loey sitting on couch excited about the thing-in-her-hands-she-can-chew-on:

And then she realizes her mom is not within two feet of her:

April SQL Quizzes at the PL/SQL Challenge by AMIS

I am very pleased to announce that the SQL quizzes at the PL/SQL Challenge for the month of April are provided by Lucas Jellema and Patrick Barel of AMIS (you will find at the end of this post a description of AMIS). Patrick is a longtime player at the PL/SQL Challenge, and also both reviews and authors SQL quizzes. Lucas is Chief Technology Officer of AMIS and a well-known and highly-regarded presenter at numerous Oracle conferences.


I hope that you enjoy their SQL quizzes. My deepest thanks to AMIS for supporting the Oracle community through the PL/SQL Challenge site.


About AMIS


AMIS is an Oracle, Java and SOA Specialist from The Netherlands, founded in 1991. Consistently active as frontrunner with the latest Oracle technology, AMIS is well known around the world for its community contributions, through presentations on conferences, Master Classes, articles in developer magazines, books and its Technology Blog (http://technology.amis.nl). AMIS has 5 Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors among its staff.

AMIS provides consultancy services around Oracle technology, including Database Development (SQL, PL/SQL, APEX); User Interface development using Java/JEE,ADF and WebCenter; SOA & BPM using SOA Suite, BPM Suite and OSB; BI using ODI, OBI EE; Security, Performance, Scalability, Availability and Administration of run time infrastructures including Database, Middleware and VMs. These services are rendered locally in The Netherlands, but also to customers in other countries and continents. Note that the Oracle Database, SQL and PL/SQL have always been crucial in the activities of AMIS.

AMIS is probably best known for its advanced knowledge, experiences and specialists. Knowledge transfer in various forms - training, coaching, reviews, "education permanente" - is a key element of what the company does. AMIS for example can deliver masterclasses and trainings on site (or through webinars) and also offers self-study materials.

The latest initiative from AMIS is the 'further' training program, targeted at experienced Oracle professionals, who are somewhat stuck in traditional tools and technology and perhaps yesterday's versions or ways of working, and who are now ready and eager to 'further' their knowledge and career. This program is offered to individual developers as well as to organizations who have teams to propel in this fashion. The program is provided in various ways and through various channels.

More information about AMIS can be found at the corporate web site, the Twitter account - @AMIS_Services, its technology blog, and through email to info@amis.nl.

Good Deeds - It's All Relative

A "news analysis" piece in the Sunday New York Times, titled "Text to Driver: That’s My Space," that explores a growing phenomenon of "parking rage." That's when you sit in your car in your parking spot and do some texting or emailing or twittering or facebooking or....anything that involves having your head bent over a small smartphone device and moving your thumbs, rather than driving away and letting someone else use the parking spot.

This anecdote caught my attention:

On weekends, said Mr. Mercuri, he drives to the suburbs to do errands at stores like Costco, where parking lots can get packed. He said that if he finds himself using his phone in his car after he shops and sees someone who needs his spot, he’ll pull into a fire lane. But on the weekdays, he said, he’s under too much pressure to give up a parking space. Monday to Friday, you have to have that hard edge,” he said. “On the weekends, I try to find small ways to do good to balance it out.” 

I must admit, I am not envious of Mr. Mercuri. He is under so much pressure that the "hard edge" critical to succeed includes ignoring the needs of the parking public. 

Now that is a man in need of edge, wherever he can get it and as hard as he can get it. 

Here's hoping his weekend charitable activities are enough to refill his cosmic karmic account.

Ohio and New York High Performance PL/SQL Trainings

I will be doing one day trainings on high performance PL/SQL and Oracle Database 11g new features in Columbus and Manhattan (NY) in April:

April 16 - Columbus more info
April 18 - Manhattan more info

These are one day, whirlwind explorations of the many ways you can get those PL/SQL programs running faster, including:

• BULK COLLECT
• FORALL
• DETERMINISTIC functions
• Function Result Cache
• NOCOPY
• DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE
• Pipelined Table Functions

Hope to see you there!

Recursive Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome

The Republican primary contest has offered many examples of the well-known Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome, whereby candidates say things that cause them, at a minimum, some embarrassment and, even worse for them, lost votes.

Today while reading the Chicago Tribune, I discovered a rare variation of the syndrome, Recursive Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome (RFIM), in which a candidate, while explaining why his foot was planted firmly in his mouth, plants a foot within that foot.

I can understand why you might be thinking that this candidate must be Newt Gingrich, who seems adept at converting massive contributions by extreme-right, arch-Zionists like Sheldon Adelson into massive losses in the polls. But, no, the master practitioner of RFIM is Rick Santorum.

So, let's see...in the last week or so he called President Obama a "snob" for (supposedly) demanding that everyone attend college (he didn't). And then Santorum took on the most popular president in U.S. history, saying that JFK's speech on the separate of religion and government made him "throw up."

Two big feet in one really big mouth. Not, however, recursive.

But then on Friday, Santorum told his devotees in Chillicothe, Ohio: "I know sometimes I can get a little wound up. You see, I don't often use a teleprompter. The worse that come out of my mouth are my own. They are not written by some poll-tested speechwriter."

So he attempts to explain away his gaffes by insisting that these are his own words, not provided by anyone else.

How does that in any way mitigate the stupidity, banality and maliciousness of those comments? Not one bit. Nope, he's just layering one foot on top of (or within) another.

Recursive Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome. Perhaps one day that will serve as yet another definition of santorum.

The Insanity of Stock Trading in the 21st Century

As anyone who's read my blog or otherwise knows me is aware, I have more than my share of criticisms of capitalism. I am not sure it is possible to come up with a better economic system than one that is market-driven. I am very certain, however, that our political system - whose sole purpose should be to protect and improve the quality of life of its citizens - must put boundaries around the behavior of capitalists.

In other words, the political system must taken priority over the economic system.

OK, well, let's put that aside for the moment. Let's just focus on the concept and then the current reality of the stock market.

The fundamental point of a stock market, from what I understand, is to provide a way for companies to obtain investment - and, closely related to that, allows an individual to make such an investment, to both express support for a company and benefit from its success.

That all sounds good to me, and I have certainly participated in the stock market over the last few decades. Now, my wife and I are contemplating selling any and all stock we have and avoiding the stock market like the plague.

Why? Because the entire system seems so fundamentally corrupted, so deeply oriented towards speculation (legalized gambling), so out of control, that it is now a destructive force in our society. And the aspect of the stock market that I think most clearly demonstrates all of this is computerized trading.

Here are a few quotes and links to articles that really drive this home for me:

Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire

"It’s as if computerized trading has created a new world, one where the usual rules don’t apply, populated by algorithms and only dimly understood by the people who made them...."There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet,” said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami and co-author of the study, released Feb. 7 on arXiv. “It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach."

Yes, that's right folks - an "enormous part of the market which is out of human reach."

"One new computer chip built specifically for high-frequency trading can prepare trades in .000000074 seconds; a proposed $300 million transatlantic cable is being built just to shave 0.006 seconds off transaction times between New York City and London.)"

Think about this: a company spending $300 million to lay a cable across the Atlantic just to make stock transactions .006 seconds faster! Blows my mind to think about all the effort, all the money - and perhaps one or persons will die in accidents laying that cable? - just so some Wall Street and London firms can trade that tiny fraction of time faster!

"Verifiable figures are elusive and estimates vary wildly, but it is claimed that a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100m (£63m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund."

It is now estimated that some 70% of all stock transactions occur through computerized trading and they happen so quickly and so frequently that they clearly have nothing at all to do with investment and economic growth.

These transactions are all about "gaming" the system, manipulating stock prices (and the conditions that drive stock prices up and down), to extract profit out of that system without providing any benefit to the stock market, the society, the world.

I know, I know - what a whiner. And I will keep on whining - all the way out of the stock market.

Ever wanted to debug lobs, object types, XML docs in your IDE?

"Exotic" datatypes, like large objects, object types, XML documents, etc. are being used by more and more Oracle development teams. And those teams, of course, are using one of many different IDEs for PL/SQL, including Toad, SQL Navigator, PL/SQL Developer, SQL Developer, etc. 

These IDEs come with source code debuggers, but unfortunately Oracle's implementation of the Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) comes with a number of limitations, including:

- CLOB: Only the first 511 characters are shown.
- BLOB: Only the first 510 bytes are shown.
- XMLTYPE, ANYDATA, ANYDATASET, ANYTYPE: No value is shown.

If you'd like to see Oracle address these limitations in the upcoming 12c version, check out my PL/SQL Obsession blog for details.

Is it Onion or is it Science?

I hope that you are aware of the Onion, a hilariously satirical newspaper and website. It continually amazes me how funny and sharp they can be, week after week.

For example:

Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term

Citing three years of exhausting partisan politics, constant gridlock in Congress, and an overall feeling that the entire nation has "completely lost it," President Barack Obama openly asked a campaign-rally crowd Tuesday why he'd want to serve another term as president of "this godforsaken country."

"My fellow Americans, I come to you today to ask, why?" Obama said to 1,200 people gathered inside a gymnasium at Taylor Allderdice High School. "Why can't our congressional leaders work together to create jobs? Why can't Wall Street ever be held accountable? And most important, why on God's green earth would I voluntarily subject myself to this nonsense for another four years?"

and how about this:

Scrunch time: The peculiar physics of crumpled paper

"WHEN you throw out your Christmas wrapping paper this year, don't tell Narayanan Menon and Anne Dominique Cambou. You'll be throwing away examples of their painstaking research.That's because they study the physics of crumpled balls of paper, which contain deeper mysteries than you might expect."

and from the same article:

"Despite technological advances, it is still extremely difficult to peer inside a simple scrunched-up paper ball with any detail."

Well, OK, actually, that second article is from New Scientist, a quirky science magazine from the UK. It's generally a fascinating read, delving into all sorts of scientific curiosities, and never shying away from the areas where science and society/politics intersect. I urge you to check out the website and even subscribe.

Isn't She Beautiful?

What can I say? I just have to share this wonderful photo of a smiling Loey Lucille....

The PL/SQL Whisperer

That is my new nickname, after my latest round of trainings in Europe.

I spent two days in Berlin, training 25 developers at an event sponsored by DOAG. Then I headed over to the Netherlands to spend a couple of days with 37 developers at an AMIS-sponsored training.

But on Tuesday, after I completed the first day of training without the assistance of a microphone, my voice said "Bye, bye!". I woke up Wednesday morning to discover I had lost the ability to speak above a whisper. DOAG hustled, did what was necessary, and brought in a portable microphone/speaker system. AMIS made certain to have the same ready to go on Thursday.

And so for three straight days, I whispered about new features of PL/SQL in 11g and much more besides. The attendees were very good natured about this less than optimal situation. One person said it made the whole class more exciting - it was as though I was giving away secrets, that no one should hear- except for the very special people in attendance.

Several students in the Dutch class even found themselves whispering to me when they asked a question - whispering, it turns out, is socially contagious! And I was quickly anointed the "PL/SQL Whisperer." Well, I can think of worse names, but I sure hope that soon I will recover my voice.

This was only my fourth business trip all year, which is a truly wonderful change from previous years (a less than fantastic result is that I will lose my Platinum status on American Airlines next week, so it will be tough to even get exit row seats when I do fly).

It was, unfortunately, a bit of a hard week on the road. Besides losing my voice, my flight on Wednesday from Berlin to Amsterdam was cancelled. I had to reroute through Zurich, but the flight to Zurich left late, so while I was able to just make the connection to Amsterdam, my bag did not follow along with me. By the end of the first day of training at AMIS offices, I had quite the five o'clock shadow. But the bag was delivered on Thursday, so it wasn't really such a big deal.

And then on Friday, I celebrated the end of a long week with a night in Amsterdam. Had a nice dinner with good friend, newly-minted Oracle ACE, AMIS consultant and father of three wonderful children, Patrick Barel. Then I went back to my hotel room to catch up on email and call my wife via Skype.

But the wireless network was not available. So the manager dutifully visited my room with an ethernet cable and (as far as I could tell) had to jam the cable a bit forcefully both into the wall and into my laptop. That made me uncomfortable. And still no Internet access.

So then he agreed to let me use the Internet in a different room - which led to a very irritating discovery: the ethernet plug would not come out of the back of the laptop. The spring that holds the cable in place had snapped. Manager Jon poked at it for a while, making me more uncomfortable, but it would not come out. Oh, I was very bummed and finally gave up, had him cut the cable so I could take the darn thing home, and figured I would have to have a technician get it out.

Yuch.

But then the day manager visited in the morning before I left for the airport. He had better tools and was able to quickly remove the plug. Whew, what a relief.

Both classes went well (of course, the students might feel differently, I suppose) - the PL/SQL community in Germany and the Netherlands is wide and deep: lots of very experienced developers attended. So I learned a few things along the way, which will soon make themselves known in PL/SQL Challenge quizzes.

I also made an interesting discovery about how students concentrate on and extra information from the hundreds of slides and hours of talking I give them to them in a two day class. I covered FORALL in the class, also its SAVE EXCEPTIONS clause. I showed slides, ran code and talked about how if at least one statement raises an error, Oracle will save the exception information and then raise the ORA-24381 error. I talked about how you should avoid writing an exception handler like:

WHEN OTHERS THEN IF SQLCODE = -24381

and instead you should declare your own exception and assign it to this error, so
you can write an exception handler like:

WHEN my_errors.forall_failure 

Then right at the end of the course, I talked about avoiding the hard-coding of error numbers and showed -24381 again as an example.

In the AMIS class, we ended with a short quiz. Two players tied for highest score (they selected 19 of 21 choices correctly across 5 questions - quite good!). So it was necessary for these two hotshots to engage in a sudden-death tiebreaker. The way I do this is I show a slide with a question and the first person to answer correctly wins.

The first slide asked: "Which feature of PL/SQL does this number relate to?" And then I showed "-24381". I thought there would be an instant response, given how often I showed and mention this number in the class.

And I was shocked to discover that neither of the students recognized the error code. I stared at them, surprised. Really? When I talked about it, referenced it multiple times, in the last two days?

Well, OK. We went on through several questions without success and then Christian Rokitta identified correctly that the optimizing compiler was first introduced in Oracle Database 10g. So congratulations to Christian for his first place showing, and to Danny Ven for the other score of 19 and his second place.

I am not exactly sure what to conclude from the inability to recognize the -24381 code. Perhaps students in my courses are confronted with so much information that they automatically filter out low level details. That way, they will be able to concentrate on the bigger picture.Certainly, people usually do not complain about how little I cover in my classes or how slowly I go through the material. And right at the beginning, I tell them to focus on principles and concepts, don't worry about all the technical details.

So I guess they took my advice!

In any case, now it is 4 AM on Sunday and I am (a) back in Chicago (hurray!) and (b) awake due to jet lag and (c) still without a voice and (d) most sadly, without a PL/SQL Challenge website. For some reason, it is unavailable but hopefully that will be fixed really soon.

Gingrich the Man - When the bar is set very low

Here's what Newt Gingrich says about himself:


"I don't claim to be the perfect candidate. I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anyone else."

Wow, now that's truly inspiring, Newt. Not.

Mostly it just tells you how terrible the field of Republican candidates for President are, for 2012 - with Gingrich himself admitting it.


Isn't it strange that in a nation with the power and prestige of the United States, in a nation with just two parties competing for power, that the Republicans are left to choose between the likes of Bachman, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul, Cain, Romney and Huntsman? 


Of course, Huntsman seems lots more human, rational and sane than the others (except for the Mormon part, to which "rational" surely does not apply - as it does not apply to Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, etc. - by definition). But he doesn't stand a chance.

Gingrich the Historian: Bring Back Child Labor!

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid," said the former House speaker Friday at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

Newt Gingrich considers himself to be a "historian," which dictionary.com says means "an expert in history; authority on history." And history is, in turn, "the branch of knowledge dealing with past events."

Perhaps Gingrich really is an expert on past events, in that he knows that they happened, and even perhaps what happened. For example, he is likely aware of the horrific abuse of children in the past, before there were "truly stupid" laws governing how and when children could work. He is probably not so aware of widespread problems today of child slavery and abuse - 'cause it's not in the past and he is a historian.

But he also seems to be a blithering idiot. How else to explain his belief that you could pay some really poor children in a school to clean up after the other, better-off children, and that this would be a good thing (instill a work ethic, and so forth)? Was he ever a child? Perhaps his grasp of personal history is terribly weak. Children can be incredibly cruel beings.

How long would it take before some evil bullies started taking dumps right on the floors in the bathroom stalls? Or deliberately eating and then puking up lots of disgusting stuff? The children who took these jobs would become laughingstocks of the entire school, objects of scorn and abuse.

But, OK, suppose that wasn't the case. Suppose that all the children in the school are really nice to each other, and would never think of doing such awful things to one another?

Presumably the school has more than a handful of really poor children, anxious to put the janitor father of some other children out of work (thereby sending the whole family into poverty) so that they can work their way out of laziness and someday become a grown-up janitor (but not at a school).

Which of these deserving and desperate children get the jobs? How do you choose? Or perhaps you rotate the honor, so that the income (surely well below minimum wage, that job killer, right, Newt?) and lessons are spread across many young minds and bodies? But then the lesson will be diluted. They might only be able to pull themselves up by a quarter of a bootstrap, which might not be enough in the 21st century.

And so on.

We all had a great laugh at Herman Cain's expense when he couldn't come up with an answer to how he felt about Obama's actions in Libya. And that was pretty funny (and awful, too, when you consider that this man claims to want us to take him seriously as a possible finger on the button of nuclear destruction). 

But why isn't Gingrich being similarly mocked and taken to task? He is supposed to be some sort of deep intellectual, fully informed about past events, ready to take on the future. And this is the best he can do? Offer up some half-assed, incredibly destructive, completely un-thought-out call to return to a past in which children were routinely abused and taken advantage of in order to increase profit margins?

Shame on you, Newt Gingrich. 

My First Song for Loey

Loey is a busy, active little baby. Eating very well, but in between feedings she is a wiggly little package. A few nights ago, I was holding her but she couldn't find a comfortable position. So I got up and walked around with her, bouncing her gently, and she quieted  down right away.

I Like to Move Around, Grandpa

by Steven Feuerstein, copyright 2011

I don't like to sit around in one place.

I like to move around, Grandpa.

Hoist me on your shoulder,

Bounce me on your legs.

I don't like to sit around, Grandpa.

Rock me in your arms,

Rub my belly on your head.

I like to move around, Grandpa.

Move around, move around, 

Move around, move around, 

I like to move around, Grandpa.

Swing me slowly side to side,

Rest me on your shoulder.

I don't like to sit around, Grandpa.

Hang me facing down,

Across your long arms.

I like to move around, Grandpa.

Move around, move around, 

Move around, move around, 

I like to move around, Grandpa.

Later, much later, I can move on my own.

I like to move around, Grandpa.

But now I'm too little and I can't walk.

So you've got to move me 'round, Grandpa.

Move around, move around, 

Move around, move around, 

I like to move around, Grandpa.

"God Told Me to Do It"

Such a statement made by, say, a murderer would be a strong indication of mental illness.

So what does it say about a Republican candidate for President of the United States?

Like Herman Cain, who said in a speech today to a national meeting of young Republicans:

"That's when I prayed and prayed and prayed. I'm a man of faith — I had to do a lot of praying for this one, more praying than I've ever done before in my life. And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses. 'You've got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?'"

We are left to assume, I suppose, that God, that all-powerful, omniscient being responded in an appropriately deep, manly tone: "YES, HERMAN CAIN, I AM SURE."

As opposed to another completely reasonable reaction, which would be to blast Herman Cain with a bolt of lightning, frying him to a black crisp for doubting the word of the Lord. 

Or maybe he just prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed....

for sooooooooooooooooooooo long that he started hallucinating from dehydration and/or hunger.

Any way you look at it (bad judgement, delusions or arrogance), this man should be kept far away from the White House.

Oh, Frabjous Joy, I Am a Grandfather!

Our very first ever in the whole wide world grandchild - our granddaughter, Loey Lucille - was born at 9:54 this morning, 30 October 2011. Ah, what a glorious feeling! Everyone is doing well, excellently, and Loey Lucille is clearly thriving from the get-go. Her father, my son, Chris, has posted the first three photos of what is sure to be a deluge of multimedia recording of Loey's life at his Facebook page.

But I have to post a photo here as well, so we can all celebrate this beautiful new life right here, right now, no hyperlinking required! And now (a week later), I am happy to announce that you can visit:

Loey Lucille on Flickr

for lots and lots of photos.

Here she is, in all her chubby, puffed-up glory:

 

Welcome, little Loey!

Wanted: Your Ideas for Enhancements to PL/SQL

On November 9, I will be doing the keynote presentation at the 100th member meeting of the Northern California OUG. The day before that I will visit with the PL/SQL development team at Oracle HQ.

It's always great to catch up not just with Bryn Llewellyn, the PL/SQL Product Manager, but also some of the developers themselves (those very special human beings who actually build the programming language at the center of so many of our lives). They'll interrogate me to get a sense of what developers are doing (and not doing) with PL/SQL out there in the "real world." And I'll find out whatever I can about new features in the upcoming release of the language (in this case, 12.1).

I usually take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to also tell them about what I'd love to see added to (or fixed in) PL/SQL. Of course, my ideas are limited to my own experience. So I thought I would ask all of you for your ideas.

What changes in PL/SQL would make the biggest difference for you and your applications?  

Feel free to reply to this post with your thoughts. You can also visit ILovePLSQLAnd.net to vote on a set of enhancement ideas, and even submit your own for consideration.

I'll pull together all the ideas I receive and present them to the PL/SQL team. But I must warn you: I don't expect to come out of this meeting with a list of confirmed enhancements planned for future PL/SQLs. That simply isn't the way Oracle plays the game. Instead, you'll just have to hold your breath until some future version of Oracle Database delivers the enhancement you requested.

Thanks in advance for your input!
Steven

Hurray! Romney getting more Wall Street money than Obama

In the 2008 election campaign, Obama was the #1 recipient of contributions from Wall Street firms and individuals. Employees of Goldman Sachs, alone, contributed $1 million. I don't know about you, but when I heard of this, I was very worried. Is he really going to stand up to the very companies who paved his way to victory? Did he make a "back room" deal to let these robber barons and their underlings avoid prosecution and come out financially whole?


Well, the verdict is in: whether or not he made any sort of deal, Obama did make an enormous mistake in continuing Bush's policy of handing over hundreds of billions of hard-earned tax dollars to a small number of companies and individuals to bail them out from their mistakes. He did not make sure (remember this was when Congress was controlled by Democrats) that these plutocrats accepted reforms to the way they do business to avoid it happening again.


No, it was "Here's all the money you could ever dream of, with no strings attached."\

Amazingly, after everything Obama has done for Wall Street, now that he is making noises about the rich paying their fair share, Wall Street is turning on the President, and showering Mitt Romney with their largess.


Well, I say: GOOD RIDDANCE! We need a Democratic candidate for President who is not beholden to Wall Street and the rich; who is willing to say clearly: "Class warfare? They are the ones waging class warfare against the middle class and poor of the United States."

Smartphones and Hotel Rooms

My friend told me at Oracle Open World in San Francisco how much he likes his new smartphone; he uses it for so many things, the interface is really nice....he is so pleased with it.

And I found myself thinking in response: I like not having a relationship with my phone.

I have a relationship with my laptop, and it's not particularly healthy.

So I am quite content to have my phone be a smallish, squarish lump in my pocket until someone calls or I need to call someone.

Yes, that means that I can't look up instructions to the restaurant at which I am meeting my sister-in-law and her family. That I can't play Angry Birds or a gazillion other game apps, many of them free or costing almost nothing.

I've decided that's OK. I don't really need to have the world at my fingertips. It's much more important to me to be in the world that is just beyond my fingertips and under my feet.

Think about this: when was the last time you experienced the earth - the very world in which your mind and body evolved to finally - in an unmediated fashion? When you were last truly in the world, not walking along a path in a nature preserve, not sitting on a chair in the lawn in your backyard, certainly not sitting in a cubicle working at your computer, but in a part of the earth that was untouched by human development, that simply was?

========================

And while in San Fran (my first business trip this year without any family along, and only my second of the year!), I realized that my favorite part of a hotel room is the latch on the door - which ensures that no one can just stroll into my room. I have privacy and that makes it feel just a little bit like home.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today would have been the 82nd birthday of my father, Sheldon Feuerstein. I miss him lots. He was a man of many talents, sharp intellect, intense devotion to family (above all else), and a deep, gravelly voice that still echoes through my brain.

And he got better as he got older! His temper mellowed, he became more open-minded, willing to challenge long-held beliefs. He got less grumpy, and overall more positive and supportive.

Dad was never terribly satisfied with what he'd accomplished with his life, and constantly wrestled with regrets. That irritated me to no end, since he was so well respected by everyone who crossed his path. He applied his intellect and workaholic tendencies (which I seem to have inherited) to ensuring his family, and most importantly his wife, was and is financially secure.

Sure, he could have done some things differently. But so much of what he did and accomplished required no correction, no regrets at all. I suppose he just set the bar higher for himself, and that does seem like a better thing to do than setting it too low.

PL/SQL Trainings in Germany and Netherlands in December

I swore over traveling just about a year and overall it's worked out very well. I am in San Francisco for Oracle Open World now, and it is only my second business trip of the year!

But as has usually been the case in past years, the end of the year gets a bit busy, and so I will be traveling twice more before the end of the year:

November 9 - Keynote speech at the 100th Northern California OUG Meeting

And then off to Europe in early December for two trainings:

Best of Oracle PL/SQL Two-Day Training
Sponsored by DOAG (German Oracle User Group)
Berlin on 6-7 December
http://www.doag.org/termine/termine.php?tid=430924

Best of Oracle PL/SQL, Best Practices and New Features
Sponsored by AMIS
Nieuwegein, Netherlands on 8-9 December
http://www.amis.nl/evenementen/617-steven-feuerstein-best-of-oracle-plsql-best-practices-and-new-feature

If you live in Germany or the Netherlands or any place close by....please consider attending one of these courses. My trips to Europe will now be few and far in between, so take advantage of my "rare" appearance!