I have got an old radio cassette in my car with a aerial mounted in the rear windscreen. The MW reception is pretty poor and if you go under a bridge, the interference nearly makes your ears bleed. As I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, this is rather irritating. After months of prevaricating and thinking, I impetuously went out and bought a Sony DAB6650. This is a DAB radio (with FM/MW/LW as well) and a CD player. The unit looks and sounds great and I now have access to lots of different DAB stations. ...

Dear Reader We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end. I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me. The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog. ...

I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents. In the early 90’s, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to ‘fiddle while Rome burned’, discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower. ...

Dear Cathy & Claire ‘I have just started going out with a boy much older than me…’ No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff’s blog. So what do I do ? I want to acknowledge Jeff’s original article. Do I post a comment on Jeff’s blog saying ‘Nice article Jeff. This inspired me to write my own followup here’ (with a link to my blog). ...

Jeff Moss' article about the commercial and free versions of Toad and the incredibly tenacious, persistent breed of salesperson bred by Quest Software got me thinking about the Oracle DBA tools I use. People SQL*Plus Statspack putty People are important because people have developed the application, people are using the application, people are managing the servers, people are managing the database and intelligent people have configured that very expensive storage array. ...