Hats off for Bam

At least 5000 people were killed in an earthquake in Bam, Iran. Depending on where you get your news, this number may be 20 or 30 thousand dead. Clearly something terrible has happened.

Here's a page with some info and great pictures of Bam and it's landmarks.

http://tinyurl.com/3xdrl

The citadel of Bam is reportedly nearly completely destroyed.

When things like this happen, I'm reminded of Alec Guiness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, when he mentions that he's felt a great disturbance in the force.

Bored of the Rings: Part Three a.m.

Last week I was in training 250 miles from home. I don't know that I could ever have one of those jobs where I had to be away from home all of the time.

The getting there doesn't bother me so much. It's the being there that bothers me, or rather the not being here. On my couch in my living room with my feet propped up on the coffee table with my wife nearby flipping through the channels and my kids asleep two doors down the hall.

Last Sunday afternoon I drove to St. Charles, Missouri where I spent the next week studying Oracle during the day and twiddling my thumbs during the evenings. Twiddling my thumbs while reviewing the day's lessons in Oracle, or as my teacher said in his St. Louis (?) accent, "Auracle."

He was an excellent teacher. I've had several over the years for various products and he was far and away the best I've had fo the simple fact that he frequently went beyond what was on the slides and pages of the book, interjecting personal experiences with the product and various options and ways of doing things.

On Wednesday, The Return of the King came out and I happened to have a friend in town who is a sales rep and covers that area. He called my hotel and offered to take me out to dinner. When he pulled up he said he'd tried to get tickets to the movie but that they only had late show tix available.

We decided we'd go and get tickets to the 11:30 p.m. show, if they were still available. They were and we were all set, but we had five hours to kill.

So we went to eat dinner at Culpeppers. We were washing down ribs and chicken wings with 44 oz. beers. This was probably not the best thing to be doing 4 hours before going to see a late run of a three hour movie.

After dinner, we headed back to hotel and started watching t.v. I smartly set the alarm clock for 15 minutes before the movie was to start. And I actually was awakened by the same.

We made it to the theater just in time to get terrible seats down in front and way to the side of the screen, we're talking like a 45 degree angle to look onto the movie screen. It was the worst place I've had to sit in a theater in years.

The movie starts out great and carries on that way for the most part, but there were times that it dragged on and on. There was too much drama. Some of the drama seemed as phony as the man on the cola commercial who closes his eyes as he takes life changing drinks of the product.

Too much phony drama, too much mushy lovey-dovey crap. The battle scenes were all great. The movie had the right amount of action and mayhem, but too much drama. Then again, I was tired from drinking big beers at dinner and it was way past my normal bedtime. That night I turned in at 3:15 a.m., and I actually made it to class on time the next morning.

I'll give the movie this, it's a great value and the matinee should be even more so.

Change in employment

After seven years with my current employer, I'm moving on. I really enjoyed my old job. The work was fun and challenging, the amount of flexibility and self-direction was about right, nonetheless, it was time for a change.

Three plus years ago when I became the DBA and programmer for the department where I spent the previous three plus years as a desktop/server system admin, I was told I would be like the Lone Ranger, working independently with little hand holding and few places to turn for help and consolation.

At the time, I was fine with that. I'd been programming since I was in the seventh grade, though without rigorous formal training. I'd been programming database driven websites for a couple of years before formally being given a job as a DBA and programmer.

I've always liked the Hebrew Proverb that says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." And so it is that I'm looking forward to joining a team of developers. I believe that my skill set will improve by working with other programmers.

At my current position, when there's a program to be developed, I am the one that researches the requirements, writes the specs and documentation, designs, codes, tests, implements and maintains the application.

It will be a learning experience for me to see how a team of people can divide a programming problem up, work independently and have a working system in the end. It will also be nice to work firsthand with someone else and see how they approach problems.

Another bonus, they are sending me to training before I report to my first day at the office.

Yes, this does mean my current job will be available soon. If you know someone who'd like a gig working with Oracle, Clipper, Perl, Windows 2003 Server, Sybase SQL Server and Delphi with the opportunity to take things in an entirely different direction, watch this space and I'll post a link to the job announcement when it's finally posted.