Doug Burns recently was kind enough to refer to my little, embryonic blog. I had been lurking around the Oracle blogs for a while and had commented on a posting on Doug’s blog about his wife’s positive reaction to the recently launched Teleport service (TV and video on demand) Now this wasn’t purely a trite comment is a desperate attempt to get someone other than the Technorati bot over to my blog. I am a Telewest customer and had previously remarked on the launch of the Teleport service on my own blog. ...

Take some time to think of ideas and develop content for the blog. I tend to jot down lots of different ideas for possible brilliant, informative articles for the blog. However, most get discarded as when I subsequently re-read them, I discover that they don’t even make sense or interest me. Some ideas are developed and refined over a longer period while other blog entries are more spontaneous. As you are composing the article, review the text carefully as you go. If the blog editor has a ‘Preview’ option, use it to review the text again before finally hitting ‘Publish’. When the article is published, review it yet again. I almost always still manage to find a nonsensical or rambling sentence on this final pass. I also subscribe to my own feed and read the article in Thunderbird where there is still scope to find the odd typo which is irritating as it means modifying and re-publishing the entry. ...

Don’t. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience. ...

London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005 The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake. The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained: “I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.” ...

When I started this blog, I simply composed the posts in the Blogger editor which was adequate. Until one day, when I lost the complete text of a draft posting due to finger trouble. As I laboriously re-typed my masterpiece, I wished I had a blog editor with the infinite undo, auto-save and all the other features of Emacs. However, composing the drafts in the Blogger editor was useful as I could edit drafts from anywhere and then publish the blog very easily. ...

After briefly evaluating Furl, del.icio.us and Blinklist, I finally decided to ditch Furl and spurn the advances of del.ico.us in favour of Blinklist as my preferred one stop shop for all my social bookmarking needs. Furl was my first experience of ‘social bookmarking’ but, as I became more comfortable with the idea of tagging Web pages, I found the Furl interface is simply horrible. There are simply too many key clicks required to add a single tag let alone two ! And if you want to add a brand new category, it takes so long that you have almost lost the will to tag the page and forgotten why it was of interest in the first place. It looks like the tagging functionality was added on as an afterthought. ...

I recently stumbled upon Lisa Dobson’s Oracle Newbies blog. Although I have never met Lisa, I admire her for two reasons. Firstly, she is about to give a presentation at the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham. I am a good deal older than Lisa and the prospect of presenting to a large number of ‘grumpy old men’ would fill me with absolute dread. Secondly, I really like Lisa’s rather self deprecating, modest statement on her profile ...

Imagine walking into a department store to buy a TV. You weigh up all the possible options and decide which model you want. The price of this TV is £457. The assistant says ‘That will be 457 pounds, Sir’ as she takes the credit card payment and arranges delivery for next week. You then happen to go up to the second floor and see the identical TV for £422. That’s £35 cheaper than what you’ve just paid. You go back to the assistant who sold you the goods to query this difference in the price. Unfortunately, the assistant is now on her lunch break but you are promised that she will call you back. She doesn’t. ...

Watches are useful. My main requirements for a watch are: Display the precise time at all times. Do not need any maintenance like winding or changing the batteries. Automatically adjust for GMT/BST. Automatically adjust for current timezone anywhere in the world. Light. I don’t want or need a micro-computer on my wrist that also tells me the weather, my resting heartbeat and the altitude. So I bought this Casio Waveceptor watch. ...

Airports are pretty dull places. Last Wednesday, I found myself at Heathrow T2, at some unearthly hour in the morning. I wandered round Dixons to have a quick look at the latest gadgets and kill some time. I happened to see a couple of items I was interested in. The first was Microsoft Office 2003 for Student Edition (3 user license). I had already seen this on Amazon at 91GBP and Dixon’s tax free price was 110GBP which was, err, twenty pounds more expensive. So, not exactly a brilliant saving at Dixons Tax Free shopping there. ...