Advert - OWI tuning course

I will be teaching an online Oracle Wait Interface tuning course for Skillbuilders in December. It will be taught on December 8 - 10 and 15 - 17 from 1:00pm - 4:30pm (Eastern Time). This is an online course, so no travel, no hotel rooms, no bad food. You can take the class from the comfort of your own cube/home.

The course is a combination of lecture and workshop and covers the wait interface, statspack, ash and how to locate and diagnose performance problems.

Here are links to the course description and registration information.

Top 10 Ways to amuse a Geek

http://nymphs.org/Random/

The Great Crackberry Experiment

I decided that it is time to replace my aging Palm Treo 680. It's been a good smartphone, but too much abuse (I drop it too often) and a desire for a smaller phone are pushing me towards replacement. After a little research, I decided on the Blackberry Curve (8310). I picked one up about 10 days ago...and returned it yesterday.

While Blackberry is very popular, I found it deficient in several key areas

• The trackball is not the easiest thing to use to select fields, icons, etc. I don't understand why they did not use a mouse cursor on the screen...much easier to move for precision.
• Configuring and using different ring modes (normal, loud, vibrate, etc) are not easy.
• Keypad is too easily pressed by accident and Lock/Unlock is kludgy.
• A key application I need (time tracking) is sorely lacking in functionality. I tried several versions and none came close to All Time by Iambic. Too bad they do not make a Blackberry version.
• Call quality was not good.
• Email pushing was sporadic.
• Although the power port was USB, non-Blackberry chargers did not work. The earphone/mic jack was not standard, so all my current wired ear pieces would not work.
  

The final straw was last Tuesday. I was nearly hit by another vehicle and I suspected that the driver was drunk. Fortunately, the state of Colorado has a cell number, *DUI, you can dial to report drunk drivers. Unfortunately, I could not find the * key nor how to spell out DUI while driving. I was able to call 911 (US Emergency #), though it meant getting bounced around between jurisdictions.

All in all...it was just not the device for me. I have decided to go back to a simple phone and some sort of PDA.