I am moving up in the Oracle World. Yes, after 6 years on the 12th floor in Oracle HQ, today I moved up to the newly refurbished 16th floor in building 300 (that’s the tallest emerald tower that says ‘Oracle’ on the top)
This will have a real impact on my life in a number of ways, for example
- In the morning I have to stand in the elevator longer, wondering if 14 people going to 14 different floors got in my elevator just to make me late for my 8am conference call, or why people can’t take the stairs from floor 2 to 3
- I have to develop a whole new set of ‘water cooler’ conversation topics with my new neighbors. Six years hard graft finding some topics in common with people that you only see for 15 seconds once or twice a week is now lost.
- I have to pack up all my stuff!
The last one can be quite scary, you might just fill 20 boxes which you then leave stacked in the corner of the office for years or you can clean out your closet, I chose the latter. Here are some interesting things I found
- Overhead projector acetate slides from my old (2000) SQL performance tuning presentation. This is what an OHP looks like (for the powerpoint generation too young to remember)
- A five pound note. Given the value of the dollar these days, storing this 5 pounds in my desk drawer for 6 years may be the best investment I have ever made.
- Install instructions for dokuwiki, I installed this one quiet Friday afternoon in 2004 on a spare linux machine sitting in Anthony’s office. That was probably one of the most productive afternoons of my career, the wiki became very widely used in our group – the reason I picked dokuwiki? Very easy install and backup – based on text files.
- A Palm V in pieces, victim of a coffee accident.
- A mostly unread copy of Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble – I scanned the book for 20 minutes and felt I pretty much got the picture – maybe the problem is my attention span?
- Business Cards, lots of them, with questions or to do items on the back. LinkedIn serves the purpose of a business card repository for me these days. If anyone out there gave me a business card with a question on over the last 5 years and is waiting for a response – post a comment on the blog and I will get back to you – business cards are so web 1.0
Enterprise Applications by David Haimes 
Congrats on moving up in the Oracle world :-). Great blog.
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Wow, your attention span was too short for Scoble? That’s very sad.
Aside from hating snap shots pop ups, your tag cloud is borked.
I heart ur blog tho.
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snap shot is off – it is very frustrating – apologies to all.
With all respect to scoble (especially as I didn’t really read his book!) I think he’s trying to adjust what he does to fit the format of a business book and frankly it just doesn’t seem to work for me.
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Hey, I remember that tuning presentation. As I remember the slides were not as cool as my RXi OHP ones with those annoying stick figures on each acetate. A vain attempt to divert folks from what I was talking about. Heady Daze!
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Glad you remember it Tim, next time we have a performance bug in the Italian VAT register we know who to call ;)
I remember your stick figures, I heard they got a regular slot on the cartoon network.
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Congratulations to your promotion! Don’t forget to install a DokuWiki in your new department.
Working for Oaracle and choosing DokuWiki because it does not use a database makes me giggle ;-)
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Andreas,
The database install would take more space than dokuwiki and my backup of dokuwiki was very quick with zero downtime (i actually stored to backup files in a databse)
nice work with dokuwiki on a stick, I like that a lot.
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Elevators can be really tricky. To help you out during your extended stays in there, I have compliled a **completely ficticious** list of ‘facts’ about Elevators – which has been added to by the magic of Audience Participation.
You can find it here: http://grumbling-dragon.blogspot.com/2007/01/elevator-facts.html
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