‘Is this Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New adventures of Grimm ?’ ‘No’ ‘New: Adventures of New Grimm ?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Is this a repeat ?’ ‘No’

People often write in and ask ‘Norman - just what is this mysterious “Music For Sheep” playlist of which you speak ?’ ‘Music For Sheep’ is my favourite music playlist of all time. It has provided solace and hope during some pretty bleak times. The playlist is ironically named as a tribute to all the social music sharing services like Spotify and last.fm which encourage sharing of your favourite bands, music and playlists. This is a novelty for 12 minutes but, ultimately a bit irrelevant because, as I remarked way back in 2006: ...

People often write in and ask ‘Is Oracle blogging dead ?’ Well, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the list of Oracle blogs I posted way back in 2007 and see what they’re up to. Life After Coffee - dead (last post May 2011). The pressure of the No. 1 slot proved too much. The Tom Kyte Blog - frequency much reduced but Tom’s a busy man. Rittman Mead - now a multi-user, shiny, corporate blog. Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis is still going strong. Eddie Awad …so is Eddie. Doug Burns - Our favourite Scotsman is still active and contemplating a migration away from Serendipity. Kevin Closson - occasional poster. David Aldridge - as above (when something annoys him). Tim Hall - still travelling the world, presenting, reading books and watching weird films. Jeff Hunter - resting (inactive since May 2012). Peter Scott - alive and well blogging under the Rittman Mead umbrella. Andrew Clarke - sporadic flurries of activity from Tooting. Chris Foot - not known at this address. William Robertson - still manages to exclaim ‘WTF?!’ once a year. Howard Rogers - still blogging from Down Under. Robert Vollman - resting (since August 2012). Andy Campbell - hijacked by spammers. Either that or he really is pimping satellite TV systems and payday loans. Moans Norgaard - pining for the fjords (since July 2010). Laurent Schneider - actively blogging about Oracle. Lisa Dobson - went to the trouble of getting her own domain and then neglected it (since Sept 2011). No longer a ’newbie'. Jeff Moss - pimping vacations in Florida. Beth - Data Geek Gal has been quiet on data quality (since Oct 2012). Steve Karam - the alchemist is busy mixing up strange concoctions involving Hadoop, Hue, Oozie and occasionally Oracle. Eric Emrick - nothing since March 2009. Alex Gorbachev - busy growing Pythian Corp. Robert Baillie - blogging about Agile, Extreme and project management after a 3 year lull. Gary Myers - moved house (still in Oz) but helpfully remembered the redirect. Nuno Souto - still blogging from Sydney. Daniel Fink - The Optimal DBA blog has been dropped with constraints cascaded - which is suboptimal. Ed Whalen - wrote a popular book in 2011, got rich on the proceeds and retired in the Caribbean.

Saturday 7 September was non-league day. There were no Premiership fixtures and Kingstonian FC had a number of offers to attract football supporters down to Kingsmeadow (half price admission for any season ticket holder). I had attended Kingstonian’s opening home league fixture and been pretty impressed by the new players recruited by Alan Dowse and the quality of the play in a 3-0 victory over Enfield Town so, on a sunny afternoon, I paid my second visit of the season to watch the K’s. ...

The Arundel House Hotel is a decent, clean, tidy and reasonably priced hotel in Cambridge. The hotel is ideally located adjacent to Jesus Green so you can easily walk into Cambridge for sight-seeing. In addition, it has a large car park which is free to residents. However, one unfortunate incident at breakfast means that I will probably never return there or honestly be able to unreservedly recommend it. I am grabbing some fruit and yogurt and returning to our table in the light and airy conservatory. As I pass the ‘Please wait here to be seated’ sign, I am surprised to see Norma standing there, waiting to be seated as she already has a seat allocated. With me. In the conservatory. Was it something I said ? ...