ORACLENERD T-Shirts in the Wild

I had a few shirts printed up for COLLABORATE 09, 15 of them to be exact. Yes Jake, I still owe you one. It's on the counter and I blame my wife.

One of those shirts I gave to Chuck Meyers who was the OAUG rep for Williams Mills. He was the "handler" for Jan Wagner. Chuck had asked for the shirt to give to Sarah Wroble, who was my initial contact with William Mills and who could not make it to the event. I only had XLs, but Chuck said she could probably use it as a night shirt or something.

Since that was the intended purpose, I didn't really want to ask for a picture in her ORACLENERD T-Shirt, lest she think me a complete pervert. I asked anyway, but somewhat tactfully.

Here are the results:

First up, Sarah Cannon


Chuck Meyers


And finally Sarah Wroble, who said, "don't judge the orange skin...didn't realize the photo shoot would take place that day and went spray tanning the day before." No judging here.


Thanks Sarah, Sarah and Chuck for being such good sports. You are the first!

SOUG: Oracle OLAP - John Paredes

I just returned from the SOUG meeting. Yes, it's 3 or 4 hours after the meeting officially ended. I needed to relax and enjoy the company of one Mr. Dan McGhan. I'll get to that in a minute though.

Tonight's presentation was on Oracle's OLAP capabilities by John Paredes who is the author of The Multidimensional Data Modeling Toolkit. John's education is in Electrical Engineering and Statistics. He's scary smart. Scientist smart. The first five minutes he demonstrated a sharp wit and a great sense of humor. Unfortunately he didn't go into the details that I was hoping for with OLAP.

I asked if he could explain the difference between OLAP and a product like OBIEE. I'm not sure he gave me an exact response, but I believe I was able to glean how OLAP fit into the Data Warehouse world. Now, I could be wrong, but OLAP essentially sits atop the data warehouse similar to a aggregate materialized view, only it's a cube...which apparently can have 5 dimensions. I thought a cube was 3, but admittedly I don't know enough about OLAP (or how it relates to data warehousing).

Ultimately his presentation was interesting. I would have preferred fewer slides and more of the technical stuff, but that's me. He discussed the role of an analyst in being able to turn this data into information that the business could then use. I did like the term Exploratory Data Analysis, which basically means, let me see the data and then I might figure something out.

The short of it, I would like to have beers with John, he just needs to utilize his natural skills a little better.

Oh yeah, Dan McGhan. I "presented" with Dan last year on Application Express at SOUG. By "presented" I mean I let him do all the talking and I not so quietly threw small problems at him by not installing Flash or dropping a table or something fun like that...I just wanted to see how he would handle it.

So we finally got out of there around 8 and headed over to Selmon's, a local eatery (more importantly though it has a bar). He described a project he's working on, to basically create PL/SQL libraries that will eventually be released into the wild. He's already released TapiGen, which generates code to do UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE on specific tables (which I'm not a huge fan of, but can at least appreciate his initiative) and also plRecur which generates dates based on recurrence. Modeled after the syntax used in DBMS_SCHEDULER. Thankfully, thankfully, Dan has seen the light and finally switched to putting commas where they belong...at the end of the line. I've been after him for that since we met. I told he we couldn't hang out until he changed.

Dan is an incredibly resourceful guy and very much under-appreciated. He's got a million ideas about future projects that I had to have a beer or 2 just to keep up with them.

It was a good night, some nice technical content and good (Oracle) conversation afterwards.

Ubuntu: The Jaunty Jackalope

I think I'm manic or something. Perhaps it was just saying it out loud finally. Or maybe it was just that time of...well, you know where I was going with that.

Though it is 2 AM EST...still can't sleep.

So I finally made the jump from Windows to Linux. I had been using the dual boot option since January. We (read: I) had to get a new computer because my 7 year old Dell 4300 wasn't quite cutting it anymore. Last year I bought I nice Dell XPS with 3 GB of memory...I could use that one. So I went searching for a laptop for wifey. I now "own" the XPS so I can actually run Oracle and other such memory intensive software.

At COLLABORATE 09, I didn't use Windows at all. Ubuntu seemed to boot quicker and I wanted to be cool at the conference. :)

The last couple of weeks I finally got around to removing Windows completely. Since I purchased Vista Ultimate, I wanted to keep some of the cool Media Center functionality (that I never use) because I paid for. I'm convinced now there is a Linux derivative. If I needed it, I could just run it in VirtualBox or some other virtual machine right? Right.

When I first booted up Windows Vista Ultimate, I checked memory consumption and it was a tad over 1 GB. Really? I haven't even installed my virus stuff yet (avast!). Thankfully I got 3 GB of it.

What's the point of all this?


And here's a snapshot of the resources consumed:



Eight percent? Nice. Now I just have to figure out how to install Oracle (the Database) and all is right in the world.

Burnout

After about 5 years of near constant activity I'm finally beginning to feel the effects.

In 2004 I started a business. I would work over 100 hours a week including my day job trying to get that thing going (which never happened). The birth of Kate in December of that year really changed my life. Pretty much every since Kate has been to keep our heads above water financially.

Early 2005 I took a different job. They (graciously) allowed me to work up to 60 hours at for time. That certainly help alleviate some of the financial pressure.

In the last quarter of 2006 I got a call from a recruiter saying I could make two and a half times that money in Tampa. I took it. Unfortunately the contract only ended up lasting about 5 weeks before I rolled into a permanent position. That was WellCare.

About 1 year ago to the day, I was fired from WellCare, ostensibly for blogging about their layoffs. Strangely, last week they announced another round of layoffs.

I then took a contract (temp to perm) position at RevolutionMoney. My hopes were very high as it was still in the start-up phase and they were looking to compete with the likes of Visa and MasterCard. Less than 2 months later though I was let go.

Five weeks after that I was brought back as a permanent employee. Only to be furloughed 3 months later and brought back 4 days later.

In April I resigned and took a position with a new company.

Oy...

Where's the burnout?

I think all of this has led to a bit of burnout. I use to come home and after the kids went to bed starting work on some other side project. Now I just catch up on all the movies I've missed over the past 5 years. The desire to do new and different things is there, just not the will. I get on the computer and start doing other, more trivial stuff.

Lately I'm trying to get Oracle installed on Ubuntu. Mostly screwed that up and will probably have to reinstall everything. I know enough to be very dangerous.

At work I've lost a bit of my fight. I'm still passionate, I just don't have the desire to argue my point all the time. Yes, I know, choose your battles and all that. Most of the fights I've had though are fundamental, like constraints. Without a position of authority (Lead or Architect or DBA or something), I'm not sure I can get others to listen.

It's not like I'm socially inept. I know how to get along and work with others. I just don't know how (anymore) how to change their minds. I've tried proving my ideas out, but it mostly doesn't matter. I'm up against something larger here.

So, I'm a bit burned out. I have not posted a technical article here in more than a month. That's frustrating.

Have you had burnout similar to mine? How do you handle it? What do you do to get over it?