Finally, after nine years, we now learn that Princess Diana (Queen Of Our Hearts ©) was actually killed by a drunk driver who was driving too fast, in an effort to avoid paparazzi, through a narrow tunnel in Paris. There was no MI5 conspiracy so the Daily Express no longer has anything to write about.

Jonathan Lewis poses a very interesting question: Have you ever wondered how hard the optimizer has to work to produce a plan ? Well actually Jonathan, curiously enough I have. Many times, in fact. Siebel 7.7 (released in 2004) was the first version of Siebel to support the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO) and pleased a lot of demanding Oracle DBA’s who looked contemptuously on the 10 year old rule based optimizer (RBO) technology and had long petitioned Siebel to finally add support for CBO to improve performance, support table partitioning, parallel query, bitmap indexes and lots of other features they wanted to use (i.e learn about). ...

I was convinced I had my address book quadruple-mirrored (Thunderbird, Palm, Gmail and ScheduleWorld) secured on resilient disk storage using RAID-5 with offsite backups. However, when I came to start writing my Christmas cards, this assumption proved be to false. I think something must have gone awry during my disaster recovery testing in the summer. Anyway, if you can remember aunties name, street name and town, you can obtain the correct postcode from the Royal Mail. ...

…has been cancelled due to lack of interest and sporting personalities. Even UK students couldn’t be bothered to mount their annual, oh so amusing, campaign for Beth Tweddle.

Penny Coates is an overpaid idiot who thinks East Midlands Airport should be renamed ‘East Midlands Airport - Nottingham, Leicester, Derby.’ Personally, I think ‘Brian Clough Airport’ would be better because Cloughie is primarily associated with Nottingham, had links with Derby and also occasionally enjoyed a curry and a few pints in Leicester. Also, the proposed name will mean that most people will miss their flights. By the time you’ve told the taxi driver your destination, the plane will be on the runway.