I know this isn’t a breathtakingly original sentiment, but the new styles of communication facilitated by the Internet throw up new situations, or are they just the same old human quirks magnified? I’ve come across a few examples recently.<\/p>\n
On the down-side, there have been a few times when I’ve felt like staying uninvolved and just getting away from the internet for a while. I’m sure I could contribute a lot more to the online Oracle community but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that it’s a fairly aggressive and negative world out there in comp.databases.oracle.server and other forums. I’m not even sure that I’m completely against the ‘shouldn’t you sit down and read the manuals for a while and come back later?’ type of response because I can understand where the posters are coming from. But if it’s turning people off who could maybe add something, surely that can’t be a good thing? It seems to me that there are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” questions and debates and when things start to get like that, I start to switch off.<\/p>\n
On the up-side, I’ve heard from a couple of old colleagues via email lately who’ve tracked me down via the blog or the px paper and that’s been an extremely pleasant surprise. I realised recently that I’ve worked with tons of people because of the nature of contracting and I’m starting to get to the embarassing stage (that I used to criticise my dad for)<\/span> of not being able to instantly remember all of my ex-colleagues. So when they pop up to remind me, it makes my day, particularly when quite a few of them think that I helped them on their way with Oracle. (Unlike a lot of contractors I’ve come across, I love helping permies get up to speed because I think everyone gains in the end.)<\/p>\n On the down-side, I just found out that an old mate who I haven’t seen for over 15 years has been hit by lung cancer and it sounds like it’s at a pretty advanced stage. This is a mixed one, because years ago I might not have heard about this until it was too late. Hopefully I can catch up with him soon.<\/p>\n On the up-side, I’ve just received a small stack of copies of Select – the IOUG’s user magazine – with the px article in it. Sadly, after various people helped out in correcting the article and I tried to get the corrections in before the deadline, it looks like they’ve only been able to print my original (flawed) article. Which is disappointing and I’ll need to fire off a few apologies to the various contributors. So why is this on the up-side? Because I’m able to have a corrected version on-line at http:\/\/oracledoug.com\/px.html. I asked that a link to this be put in the article if they couldn’t get the changes in in time, but although there’s a link to my home page, the link to the paper isn’t explicit in the magazine. So, hopefully people will see this instead! For info, the biggest flaw by far is that, based on my prior knowledge of parallel DML, I insisted that there was only one px slave per partition on a partitioned table. Which is demonstrable rubbish. I know it’s demonstrable because that’s exactly what Tom Kyte and Jonathan Lewis did. (Doh!)<\/p>\n So, if you’re a Select reader, check out the most up-to-date version online.<\/p>\n Finally on the up-side, I enjoyed getting a few house-warming messages now that I’ve managed to make the move to blogger.com. I have to say that it seems like a much better experience so far. Now how do<\/span> you all manage your RSS feeds to orablogs.com?<\/p>\n Maybe the internet just makes our community bigger and more varied and in some ways that’s actually harder to deal with than the small community of family and friends you might come across in the past. It definitely makes things a lot more interesting though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"