Americans see nothing but gloom and doom on the horizon in 2007. No hang on - wait a minute. From the same poll, Americans are optimistic and hopeful for the coming year.

January - new sofa October - new kitchen table and chairs November - new coffee table I just hope and pray that I don’t have to set foot inside a furniture store (or worse, Ikea) in 2007.

Hung from the gallows and simultaneously shot from a camera phone.

Cousin John called with best wishes for the New Year and just wanted to mention the Billy Connolly double CD. He was absolutely delighted with this thoughtful gift and was looking forward immensely to listening to it in the car. I graciously accepted his thanks and reciprocated by thanking him for my M&S Men’s Grooming Set complete with black leather carry case. I assured him that when we next meet, my nasal hair will be trimmed, my bushy eyebrows will no longer meet in the middle and my ears will be fluff-free. ...

Regularly refreshing Oracle statistics on all tables, indexes and column histograms flushes the shared pool and can occasionally lead to some unexpected and unpleasant surprises. Thankfully, Oracle 10g automatically maintains 31 days of statistics history which means it is trivial to revert to a previous set in order to restore service to the production environment while you investigate further. A perfectly valid strategy for statistics gathering is to gather, test, validate, save and leave well alone. ...