MySQL Tutorials
Happiness, it seems, is just a space away.
Artistic & Favorites
Put together album of my more artistic and favorite photos.
Dublin
Managed to sneak in a trip to Dublin
Site Map
To find web pages more easily, check out the site map.Site Plans
Because of the growth in size and popularity, I've added a page to list changes and plans for this site.Selected Photos
By default now, only selected photos will be shown for albums unless you choose to view all.Marie in Italy
Finally, all parties involved have agreed and the tickets have been purchased for my daughter Marie to go to Italy. I'm in the U.S. at the moment; she will go with me when I return at the end of May. This will be her first trip to Europe. She's very excited and has been bragging to her friends about going to Italy. She wants to eat plenty of gelato, to go horseback riding, and to visit her cousin, Martina in Sicily—the one with lots of Barbie dolls. We're planning on spending about four days in Sicily, a few days in Rome, a couple of days in the northeast seeing Venice and Trieste, and a day or so in Tuscany to see Florence and mostly for horseback riding. The rest of the time we will be hanging out in Milan. We should have a fabulous time. Hopefully, it'll be a good foundation for her future as a traveler.
Resistence is Futile
I tried to resist buying an iPhone—I lasted about a year—but I finally gave in. I had been thinking about getting something slicker, but keep telling myself and anyone who would listen that my simple, but slender Motorola Razr was good enough and still stylish. The first blow that pushed me towards replacing it was when I saw the guy doing plaster work in my new apartment talking on his Motorola Razr. When I went to the MySQL user conference last week, I cracked after having many people wave their iPhones at me, secretively sneaing at my little Motorola. So, I bought an iPhone at an AT&T store, but avoided signing up for their service. After trying a few different packages, I managed to get it running with my T-Mobile sim card—which means that I will be able to switch to my Vodafone sim card when I get back to Italy.Now that I have one, I can say that while it is cool, it's not as great as it could be. It's like a Palm Pilot, but in someways not as versatile. For instance, although it uses Apple widgets (small applications), Apple has blocked normal users from being able to install additional widgets—it comes with a few that have been chosen by the designers. For us abnormal users, installing more widgets is possible. I just haven't had the patience and time so far to figure out how to do it. The iPhone is better than a Palm Pilot, though, in that it's able to multi-task. On my Palm Pilot, it has wireless networking capabilities, but it can't automatically check email in the background while I'm running a different application. I can't bounce between programs without them being dumped whenever I jump. So, if Apple would just drop the barriers of installing applications and using other telephone services, it would be an excellent cell phone and PDA.
Copyright 2008 Russell J.T. Dyer. All Rights Reserved.
Musings
Below are recent musings of mine. Click on an entry heading to read its full text. Click on the musings tab at the top left to see all of them.
An apology for statue photos
Statues are essentially works of art. I feel silly photographing them sometimes because I'm photographing art, an abstract of reality. Instead of photographing a person, I'm photographing a sculpture of a person. I also photograph people, but to photograph art doesn't quite seem like art. jul 8, 2008 04:07 pm no commentsWhy I want Hillary to Win
Although I have valid reasons for believing that Hillary Clinton is the best candidate for president, I realize that I also have psychological reasons for wanting her to win. I am thrilled that neither she nor Barack Obama will go to the Democratic convention without enough non-super delegate votes to win the nomination. This will give her an opportunity to win it by negotiating, arguing, fighting, and other methods that will show her political strength over Barack Obama—which is one of many factors that I think make her the better candidate. That moment at the convention is something for which I seem to have an emotional need. The source of that need has nothing to do with her or politics, but it seems to be a need that many of her followers share with me. may 22, 2008 11:05 am no commentsMySQL takes the Red Pill
As a current employee of MySQL and having worked in the investment industry for over twelve years in a previous life, I'm able to see the larger picture of the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems for a billion dollars. My vision is that we've been like a pig on a farm bragging about how fat we're getting. It's only a matter of time before someone eats us. So if bought out, it's better to be the one to decide who will have us. jan 18, 2008 12:01 am no commentsLiterary Criticisms
This is the start of something new on my site, book reviews of novels. For an explanation of these, see my page on Book Reviews
In the Bookstores!
The second edition of my book, MySQL in a Nutshell has been printed and bound. It's now available at bookstores around the world. The publisher sent me a box of them. If you'd like to review the book to do an article for a publication or web site, let me know and I'll send you a copy.
Second Novel
Now that the second edition of my Nutshell book is in the bookstores, I have time now—or I should say, creative energy available to work on my second novel. Since I wouldn't let myself work on it all this time, I've accumulated plenty of notes on it. So, I've used those notes to put together an outline—something I almost never do. The advantage of having this extensive outline, I'm learning, is that I can write the chapters in modules and am not required to write them in order. My style of writing is not a stream of imagination but meticulous crafting. I've roughed out three chapters so far and hope to finish my first full draft by the end of the summer. Click on novels above to learn more about this new novel and my first one.