Tag: oracle

It’s HOT!

It’s F’ing HOT out today! I just got back from a 12.5 mile bike ride around the backbay.

Anyways, it was bloody HOT! I was sweating like crazy and my muscles are starting to scream at me and say…”STOP WORKING OUT!” lol. I’ve been biking like crazy lately and working out, I did my first personal trainer session which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but I was a bit tired after. I am excited for the next one. But my muscles haven’t had a day off in nearly two weeks! I was thinking of doing a 45 mile very hilly ride this weekend. But I am not sure if my legs can take the punishment. Perhaps I will try anyways.

This morning I came in and was very bored at the office, but then I got a really fun project. Sadly that only took me 30 minutes to do. 🙁

I got my taxes back. I should be getting nearly $2,000 back! Yay! $500 of it is already spent on two trips to Houston, and I am hoping that I can arrange something with Const so that the rest of it can go towards a ticket to Russia for a week in August. ::hint hint::

Speaking of hints, he’s not very good at catching onto them! haha.

I talked to the CEO the other day. I have been denied any further Oracle training. I’m pretty pissed about this. When he spoke to me about it in December, he said they would be spending nearly $20k on me for training. Which means the full education courses, we’re talking months of training, etc. Well I sent him an email to see if I could try and arrange the next course so that I could be in Houston. Well he tells me that he thinks that now that I’ve been through the first two main classes (which only cost them $6k) that’s enough. UGH! Very annoying. This was one of the reasons I put my MBA on hold because I thought that I would be going through this training for the rest of the year! Now I have nothing to do… OH well, just gives me more time to prepare for my GMAT test when i do take it!

I got to have lunch with Nick and Dustin this week as well. That was very nice, I haven’t seen them in so long. I miss having them around, and I wish there were still a place in OC that we could go clubing toooooo!

This weekend I am supposed to go rock climbing with Const’s sister and one of their friends. I am a bit nervous about hanging out with them without Const being there. You all know my odd issue with bf’s hanging out with the bf’s friends (do you understand that?). Anyways. It should be fun, they are going to be going up to the Poppy Preserve in a few weeks so I want to go on that.

Sorry for the rambling, I’m just bored! Adios!

Unmotivational!

I’ve been very unmotivated lately to really do anything.

I’ve had a string of bad/annoying clients lately with the whole freelance thing, so that’s put me off. I seriously cannot believe how stupid some of these people are. IE: one guy was bitching because i sent him a link to his site that didn’t have “www.” in front of it. The same guy was also trying to watch STREAMING VIDEO from his website over a fucking AOL Dial up connection! What a twat!

Then at work, I’ve been feeling very un-needed because of this whole new “project lead” shit that one guy got. I’ve been struggling with trying to get something very simple done and my clients at the office are being VERY slow to reply! Then I just spent 2 days doing a whole new menu system that I hand coded on the corp website, only to be yelled at by the CEO because we purchased a menu system that took me about 10 minutes to implement. Also I feel that they are going to forget about the whole Oracle training again. I just asked and the CEO said that he’ll “let me know when the time is right.” UGH! Very annoying. If they are going to be serious about this, then they would be doing them back to back. I am going to FORGET EVERYTHING I learned in the first one before the next one.

I have also been studying for my GMAT and I am so going to fail this test. Everything in the book is so hard. I finished all the vocab stuff and most of what I thought was right is wrong! :'( Maybe I’m just not cut out for Grad school. But I really want to go. I have officially sent in my application and everything, I just have to get the fucking GMAT taken.

I’m also feeling very broke. Now with a $1,000 car repair bill, the cost of a rental car, an additional $400 that I have to pay for insurance because I reduced my deductible, the cost of doing my taxes, what I will owe for my taxes and a 6-month gift for Const. I am just flat broke right now. I did a quick 1040EZ the other day and based on that I will owe about $1,000 more for taxes this year as well! Hopefully my tax woman can bring that down. If I’m eligible for this rebate check the government is sending out, it’s not going to get far with me, it’ll probably just go right back to them!

I’ve also been wanting to redesign my blog, I just haven’t had the energy to actually do it! I have some ideas. Just nothing that seems good.

Plus to top it all off, Constantine leaves in a month! :'(

I’m so Lucky

To be able to work with such smart people at my office.

Everyone there really seems to know their shit, no bullshit, etc.

After seeing these people in this training class and hearing the kinds of questions they have, it’s amazing that they are able to keep the jobs they have.

We were talking about Character sets the other day and the professor was explaining how Oracle will convert a date format to whatever format the User has specified in their session. IE, I’m in the US, so I have a US char set. Therefore I can tell Oracle today’s date is ’01-12-2008′ and it will know that means January, 12. Not December 1 as it would be in Europe. However, if I’m in Europe and have some european char set, it will give me todays date in 12-01-2008.

So some girl asks. “So what if I have a user in China and they enter their name in Chinese, will Oracle convert that to English?”

Are you fucking kidding me?!? WTF! And this girl is a DBA at Edwards Airforce base! A couple days before that the professor went off on a tangent about the primaries and electoral colleges, etc. The same girl asked what an electoral college was. This woman was freaking in her 40’s! How do you NOT KNOW what an electoral college is?

UGH. Seriously! And these DBA’s were asking questions that they should ALREADY KNOW! I mean seriously, I’ve hardly touched Oracle, I know how to install it, I know how to write SQL and PL/SQL, and that’s about it! But I knew alot more about the advanced Oracle setup then they did. Most of them had NO BACKUP policies in place, no RAID on the servers, nothing. So basically if there’s a horrible crash, they lose EVERYTHING.

How do these people get to the positions that they have? I don’t freaking get it!

Training

Ugh! Yesterday was a really bad day for me…

First the accident.

Then I get to training and he comes in and basically starts with a pop-quiz… Picks me first and starts asking all these questions about databases and shit. Stuff I would have known back in college. Stuff that I know the concepts to, but not the technical terms.

Anyways, I don’t know any of his answers… He says. “Well you should have learned all that in the first part of this class”. Somehow I got signed up for “Oracle Database 10g: Administration Workshop II”… NOTICE the two “II” at the end? Well I didn’t until yesterday!

My CEO sent me a link a while back and said. “Sign up for this class”. The link was directly to the signup page which needed all kinds of personal information, so he couldn’t do it for me. I didn’t even bother to look at the title at the time. And now when I go back and look at the confirmation page that I printed it just says “Oracle Database 10g: Administration Workshop”. I had NO IDEA that I was being signed up for the level 2 class. I SHOULD have been in the Level 1 class! I don’t know that much about Oracle.

I don’t know if he just thinks I know more then I do, or what. But it was very stressful all day because of that, and the accident and my Insurance agent kept calling and what not. There were moments when I was about ready to just crawl under the desk and cry. lol

Last night I decided that I wasn’t in the mood to drive back to LA, and I had already planned on hanging out with Nick for a couple hours, so I asked if I could just crash there. He agreed, so I went down there and we had dinner at Koffee Klatch and watched October Sky. Which was an excellent movie.

Speaking of Movie, this past weekend was just excellent at least. Friday I picked up Const from the airport and dressed up as a chauffeur, with a sign even. I carried his bags for him and what not. Saturday we went shopping with Erick and Jason for the day then headed out to Pasadena for a Thanksgiving dinner. That was lots of fun to hang out with some of Constantine’s friends for once. Sunday we lounged around the house for a couple hours and then went to Best Buy to spend my Gift Certificate, which I again couldn’t really find anything that I wanted to spend the money on. After that we went and watched The Bucket List. It was a pretty good movie. I was crying by the end, but I would suggest waiting for it to come out for rent or something. Some stupid lady behind us kept talking through the whole movie! Very annoying. After the movie we went to Cheesecake factory for some food and chatting. It was all very nice.

It also rained a lot this weekend, which was very relaxing and great. When I was dropping const off at his house that night it was raining pretty good. I wanted to stand there for a bit and make out with him in the rain, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have liked doing that in front of his parents house! haha.

Anyways, today is day two of training, I must start studying up!

Adios!

Oracle and Old computers

The other day I started trying to install Oracle on my home computer… I didn’t quite realize how old those suckers were.

Neither of my two servers have enough RAM to run Oracle server. How sad is that! I have both an AMD 64 3200+ with 512 Megs of RAM and a Pentium 4 1.6ghz with 1 gig of RAM. Both of which are RIGHT at the minimums for Oracle to run. Later that day, I was doing one of my FAVORITE past times of Stumbling. And I found this great site with a list of all the processors and the associated benchmarks. My oldest computer is the 5th from the bottom at 221 and my other computer is at 401! :'( I gotta upgrade those suckers! They are sooo slow!

I can get a Dell $500 computer which would be rated at 1,400 on that list! :'( Too bad I can’t afford SHIT anymore!

Speaking of, I was looking over my finances the last couple months and there’s about $900/month that I can’t account for. I know I’ve been spending a lot more lately then normal, but MY GOD! $900/month worth! That’s fucking insane.

I have taken actions to rein in my spending today. First, I changed my direct deposit so that savings money is AUTOMATICALLY transfered to my savings account. Second I have changed banks so that my spending and my bills account are at SEPARATE banks, the direct deposit change also changed so that these will be AUTOMATICALLY funded with the correct amounts. And lastly, I have paid off my Amex card (which thanks to the new car had ballooned to over $7k!!) and will not be using it anymore except for in emergencies and buying stuff online.

I am also creating a new rule for myself, any purchase which must be funded by a loan, must be kept and used for twice the length of the loan. IE. I financed the new car for 3 years, it must be kept for a minimum of 6 years. Although I am personally shooting for closer to 10 years, unless gas prices go crazy high.

In gas news, Congress passed the new CAFE requirements, so the average vehicle will be getting 35mpg by 2020. Personally, I think it should be 2015 at the latest, but at least it’s a start in the right direction… uhoh! There I go with the whole Pot, kettle, black thing!

This past weekend was really great, Saturday night we had the last dinner party of the year. Constantine bought the group UNO Attack. It’s SO much fun! Everyone should go out and buy it! Jason of course cooked an amazing dinner of Chicken Catchatori and I made Eggnog CheeseCake. Delicious! I was so fat buy the time the night was over!

Sunday I had a business meeting at 9am and then Constantine, Jason, Erick and I went out to Noah’s in Manhattan Beach for breakfast. I did laundry the rest of the day and cleaned the house, I emptied out all my cabinets and washed every dish I own, washed the cabinets themselves, and some other stuff.

Monday I started cooking our dinner for Wed, I made the dessert and the noodles. I’m making Constantine a traditional Black family holiday meal. Although, not as CRAZY as our real family gatherings with all the candies, and side dishes, the 800 pies and what not. Just the standard main fair of Roast, Mashed Potatoes, Noodles, Corn and one dessert! 🙂 It’s going to be delish! I can’t wait!

I also bleached basically everything in my house last night, the counter tops, the stove, the floors, the bathroom. It’s almost as if my cleaning lady had come again! Oh how I miss her! :'(

Tonight we are going to the Charles Phoenix Holiday Jubilee and before that we’re going to dinner at Philippes the ORIGINAL home of the french dip! Should be a wonderful night!

Tomorrow Constantine and I are having our holiday festivities with the previously mentioned meal, and then present opening! I can’t wait to see if he’ll like what I got him! I sure hope so, because that boy doesn’t give ANY hints about what he wants… And he’s seen how my family does christmas shopping.
“Hey mom what do you want?”
“Oh, an all in one printer”
“Do you have any models in mind”
“Not really”
“Ok, I’m going to go out and get it”

So shopping without hints was hard for me! But I feel that I got him something he’ll really like. 🙂