Biographies

I am in a biography phase at the moment. That’s kind of how my reading goes these last couple of years – through phases. There was a Proust phase, a 19th C French classics phase (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dumas, Maupassant, etc), a 19th/20th C Russian phase (Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Chekov, Tourginev, Gogol, etc), a Japanese lit [...]

Still up to my eyeballs…

I really need to be more consistent with my blogging.
Quick note for today: almost done with Troubleshooting Oracle Performance as referred to in the side column here on my blog. It is a very highly recommendable book with fantastic advice and details for anyone who wants to improve Oracle performance.
I can’t wait to put some [...]

Happy Holidays

Sorry for the drop in writing lately. Family events and holidays oblige. What’s happening with me? Well,
Reading: Vol 2 of Blotner’s biography of Faulkner. Fascinating. Sad that some of the greatest American writers of the 20th C (Faulkner and Hemmingway in particular) were heavy, chronic alcoholics. I didn’t know that Faulkner was hospitalized several times [...]

Middle of second week – treading water

So, middle of second week @ new job has come and gone. The laptop screen is now ghosting old windows under current ones and giving me really annoying vertical lines all across the screen. Yikes. And the remote access for my MBP is not working. According to Apani, it is my company’s VPN that is [...]

Off on vacation…assorted musings

I am off for two weeks with the wife and kid at La Tranche sur Mer in the Vendée. Some projects I plan for early September (so please come back soon
- More soft topics (what I am reading non-professionally)
- More technical stuff as well
- More playing with widgets
Trying to figure out what tool [...]