The joy of being taught...

Every now and then you meet a person who not only has a wast pool of knowledge to dig into, but who is also able to share their knowledge in a way that makes it easy and fun to learn.

When I was at university I met one such person and that was Professor Dr. James L. Massey. I always left his lectures with new knowledge, multiple new sources for more knowledge and above all, a desire to learn more about the subject. It is a rare gift to be so knowledgable and yet so able to teach to almost everyone.

This week, I've met another person who combines wast knowledge with the ability to explain and make somewhat complex subjects easy to understand. Thursday and Friday this week, I attended the Advanced RMAN seminar by Arup Nanda in Kista. It was one of the best trainings I have ever attended, possibly because mr. Nanda still is a practicing DBA and actually knows what he is talking about.

I'm looking forward to test most of the things we discussed over the last two days and implement them into our systems at work.

Not a happy camper...

Today something happened at work that never has happened to me before.

I asked for some information that I really needed in order to build a new release of the software we are developing. Instead of answering, the PM started talking about something else, when I asked the same question again, he started trying to humiliate me in front of my coworkers.

I was so shocked, that I only realized what happened afterwards. Now I need to decide how I should act tomorrow. I'm not at all allocated to the project, the application is packaged automatically somehow I guess...

I talked to some of my other coworkers who also were present and they didn't understand what happened either.

After working 12 years in different consulting roles, I was excited to start this job a year ago. It was something new, working for a development department in an IT department at a large corporation. I have to say that it has been a disappointment, my assignments have not been interesting at all, instead of doing development work as I was lead to believe, I've been working with build and deploy. I've been assigned to support and infrastructure, next year the budget for infrastructure has been cut, which probably means that I will be doing more support work.

I have a meeting with my manager on monday, we'll see what happens...

Online communities - interesting but sometimes forgotten

I was pretty late starting to blog and also to start using twitter, it never seemed to be enough time over for it, but I have decided to try. It is also a bit scary to publish parts of my life online. I'm a very private person.

Anyway, I've realised that I have already published parts of my life online, without thinking very much about it. I have a linked-in account (http://se.linkedin.com/in/johanmartensson) , which is meant to be another way to find the perfect job (if there is such a thing).

Today, for some reason I remembered that I also have created an account on VirtualTourist (http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/17e83/), which is a community for travellers all over the world. I created the account 2000, but I have not updated my information since 2003, until today. Virtual Tourist is not the most well-known community in the world, but I really like it and I will make an effort to update my pages and add some interesting travel stories.

However, it makes you think, whenever you register any information online, it will stay there for much longer than you might think...

Initial post

Hi there,

this blog will (hopefully) be updated frequently and deal with anything that interests me at the moment.

It could be work related, for example a cool Oracle feature or a useful Unix script.
It could just as well be about good food and drinks (single malt whisky is always interesting) or about a good book I'm reading.

Another probable topic is home improvement and the joy of building something with my own hands.

Anyhow, I hope to see you again soon...