During a ritual purge of ‘Inbox’, I just discovered the following email Years ago, in a different life. I worked as an Oracle DBA for a dot com in deepest Clapham. For reasons that now escape me, the CEO managed to get a discounted rate so we could all lie in complete darkness in a flotation chamber listening to whale music with joss sticks burning. Performance was pretty bad and the backups never got done but we were all completely relaxed about it. ...

From the desk of Mr. Ashley. Good day. Private message to you. I know you don’t mind me contacting you by this means since we have not met before this time. My name is Lord King Glorious Michael ‘Haway the Lads’ Ashley. Recently, my Uncle’s (Sir Robert Robson of Gateshead) will was read and to our joy and relief, he has kept the sum of $8 milion USD in trust for the upkeep of the beloved Newcastle Footballing Club. ...

Introduction Habari is a blogging platform, created back in January 2007 and in the subsequent 18 months, the software has matured and version 0.5.1 was recently released. Originally, I downloaded and experimented with Habari late in 2007 but it wasn’t until February 2008 that I finally took the plunge and migrated my blog from WordPress. Installation Habari requires PHP 5.2 (or higher) and PHP Data Objects (PDO). If your hosting company can’t meet these requirements, think about switching to one that can. Habari also supports multiple database types: ...

+1 for a ‘friend’ +5 for a ‘follower’ +10 for a blog comment +25 for a blog contact +50 for an email +100 for a photo +250 for a NSFW photo +400 for an audio conversation +99,999 for a hot steamy IM session +1,000,000 for sharing a pint

After over five varied and enjoyable years working for Siebel (and then Oracle) in Expert Services, I am changing jobs. However, I will continue to work for Oracle as part of the group responsible for ‘Social CRM’. Although this was a internal transfer, my interview process was quite unusual. Instead of being forced to massage my CV into Microsoft Word format and send an email attachment to a faceless recruitment agency, I was able to publish my CV using Google Docs and the whole interview process was conducted by telephone. ...