what i learned today

Oracle makes my head hurt.

Actually I think it's trying to become an expert on a new subject in a week that's making my head hurt.

And being the perfectionist that I am ... of course I *have* to know how Oracle works to the same degree that i understand how SQL Server works. Yet everyone keeps telling me how SIMILAR Oracle and SQL Server are. Sure ... similarities are all good and well and stuff ... but every time I go to do something in Oracle I'm noticing the DIFFERENCES and no one wants to spend time explaining the differences. Beginning to wonder if anyone knows whatthe differences are in a way that can be explained.

So ... now i'm off researching what the heck a tnsnames.ora file is and why i need it. You think that'd be easy to find on the 'net. Nooooooo ... lots of information about how to configure one and advanced details about neat tricks you can do with them to enhance performance. Which now means i'm wading thru masses of technical info that's way over my head to start to get
an understanding of this. But, oooh ... this looks promising:

http://www.dba-oracle.com/tips_oracle_tnsnames_ora_file.htm
<http://www.dba-oracle.com/tips_oracle_tnsnames_ora_file.htm>

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My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our
marriage would have been wrecked. - Winston Churchill

meetings, meetings and more meetings ... go pats!

i think i've been in meetings for 18 of the past 24 hours. at work ... at home ... at least the home meeting i felt like something was accomplished (mom and i updated her company website - statcarepharmacy.com - the bottle of wine made it less painful too!). but at work ... *sigh* they're killing me with these meetings. the business has been after us for as long as i've been there (3 1/2 weeks now) for estimates on when we'll roll out CC/CQ SR4. i gave a presentation today with target dates. the business immediately starts panicking that the dates aren't good and we need to push it out further. same people who were on our case just an hour before that we were taking too long to get things rolled out.

oh well ... beer is good. football is better. if d ever gets thru traffic to pick me up ... we can sit in more traffic on 495 on our way to foxboro. :op (why doesn't blogger offer cool smilies???) i think we're going to be out of luck on the whole tailgating pre-game thing. we'll probably get there just about in time to go in. pats v saints. sure it's preseason, but ... a semi-significant game. brady may see a couple snaps. flutie should see a lot!! plus we actually play the saints this season. a preview of the match up. and wow, d is taking forever to get here ... almost finished my beer and he was supposed to be here 20 minutes ago. kindda hoped opening the beer would have caused him to arrive ...

bored now ...

hrm ... time for another site redesign? current look just isn't doing it for me. but such a PITA to update all those photo pages ... well ... with the photo album tool i've been using it isn't so bad now i suppose ... will just need to redesign the template and then have it regenerate the pages. i suppose i can live with that. but what to do? what to do? been playing with blogger to see if i can happily use that instead. i'm getting lazy in my old age and don't want to update html by hand anymore! lol

ooh ... we finally meet glory! :) ok ... i'm such a geek playing with my blog and watching buffy.

now if only i really had something of value to say ... >:)