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. ...

‘Sorry Sir but I haven’t done my homework because I have really bad stomach ache.’

How the big clubs approach the problem… Manchester United - Alex Ferguson chooses to invite Jose Mourinho to the boardroom to share a bottle of expensive Portuguese wine. Pointedly applaud United fans who chant ‘Your coat’s from Matalan’ on the way to the tunnel. Then shut up and assemble a team that actually looks capable of challenging Chelsea. Liverpool - Appeal to the House of Lords, the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and the European Court of Human Rights after Mourinho has the audacity and bare faced cheek to put his finger to his mouth after a Chelsea goal in the Carling Cup Final. Hold a annual 5 minute silence at Anfield for all those fans suffering post traumatic stress disorder as a consequence. ...

In the 1980’s, some ladies chose to wear dark trouser suits and blouses in an effort to match their male counterparts in the workplace. This fad was known as ‘power dressing’. One of my least favourite films is ‘What Women Want’ starring Mel Gibson. I also thought Kurt Cobain looked pretty cool in a dress and Dave Grohl managed to carry off wearing a bra (and a baseball cap) without looking ridiculous. ...

Tuesday - An empty black hold-all crashes to the floor from its precarious position on top of the wardrobe alongside miscellaneous Christmas packages. Wednesday - A full length mirror falls and rotates through 180’ from being propped up against the fireplace and sandwiched against a box of files. I tried to reproduce the path the mirror must have taken but there simply isn’t enough room for the mirror to have fallen the way it did. ...

‘Oh aye Janice, listen. When my Dougie gave up smoking, the transformation was miraculous. He seemed like a new man. It was absolutely fantastic. His breath was fresh and clean. His teeth were gleaming white and he just seemed to have much more energy. Why, one day, he even smiled. And, Janice, let me tell you, my Dougie became a tiger in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.’ ...

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). ...