Tag! Here goes a chain letter…

 

I just got tagged by Chris Muir, so here goes my 8 things you may not know about me:

  1. When I was 14 years old I weighed 19 stone. That’s 266 pounds or 121 kilos.
  2. I was a distinctly average student at school. A few of my friends were surprised when I passed my exams. Education only really started to click with me after I left school and could focus on subjects I was interested in. At sixth form and university I started getting into my groove.
  3. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15, so that’s about 23 years and counting. Even before that I ate very little meat and I never ate fish. I don’t like eggs and I can’t drink milk on its own. I love cheese. Life without cheese is not life. πŸ™‚
  4. I have a form of diabetes known as MODY. In my case it relates to a mutation of the Glucokinase gene. It’s no big thing, but I have to avoid getting too fat and I have to be careful with sugary food (refined or natural).
  5. I played guitar in a couple of bands (Pondlife and Coppertongue) at University. The bands were pretty good, but I wasn’t. I specialized in making weird noises with my guitar effects, rather than actually playing.
  6. I love singing. If I’m alone I sing out loud. If I’m in public I sing in my head. If you see me in the street or in a shop I’m not a crazy guy talking to himself. I’m just singing. πŸ™‚ I can hold a tune, but I’m no star in the making.
  7. Most of my adult life I’ve been an insomniac. I find it very difficult to get to sleep and when I do I wake up a lot during the night. As a result I tend to remember lots of dreams. On average about 3-5 distinct dreams a night. I keep meaning to start writing them down but I’ve never got round to it yet.
  8. I started working with Oracle by accident. I was at an interview and they asked me if I’d heard of Oracle and I said, “Is that the teletext stuff on TV?” At the time Oracle was the name for teletext on ITV, so it wasn’t as dumb as it sounds. Somehow I got the job anyway and the rest is history.

I’m going to tag Andrew Clarke, Andy C, David Aldridge, Dimitri Gielis, Howard Rogers, Jeff Hunter, John Scott and Kevin Closson. (Alphabetical from my blogroll, hopefully not repeating anyone. πŸ™‚ )

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

14 thoughts on “Tag! Here goes a chain letter…”

  1. Could you maybe do the decent thing and contact your 8 and tell them not to participate in this rigmarole?

    By all means, let them share their 8 secrets… but please stop passing this on and encouraging others to do likewise.

    It’s flooding the Oracle news aggregators with complete garbage, which is what happens after 8*8*8*8 pieces of blog spam are allowed to proliferate.

  2. Here’s the funny thing Howard. It’s my blog and I can do whatever I like with it.

    I’ve never asked to be put on any aggregator list because I write lots of non-Oracle posts. The fact that other people have chosen to aggregate my blog is there business.

    Cheers

    Tim…

  3. Some people are miserable sods aren’t they.

    Great list Tim πŸ˜€ and I do like #6, if I meet you in the street I’ll have to try to remember what song it is you are singing!

  4. Well no, not miserable at all actually.

    Funny thing is, Graham, I see your blog’s current(ish) post is all about you having to enable a spam filter because, and I quote, “the sheer level of crap that is getting published in the comments has made me do it.”

    So, some people are allowed to filter ‘crap’ out, but the rest of us just have to put up with it or be personally abused, is that the way this works?

  5. Comment spam is unsolicited. Writing posts about something you are interested in is not. If you don’t like it, don’t subscribe to the blogs or blog aggregators. Simple really!

    Cheers

    Tim…

  6. Comment spam is unsolicited. Writing posts about something you are interested in is not.

    Right. So the people that send spam emails are OK then, because they’re writing stuff about things they’re interested in (getting you to spend money, basically)? I don’t think so.

    Comment spam may well be unsolicited, but ‘blog spam’, when a news aggregator is flooded by dozens of similar posts, is similarly unpleasant.

    Spam is spam, Tim, whoever writes it and in whatever form it presents itself.

    But you do indeed remind me of the woman on the train who, when I asked her politely to turn down her “personal” stereo spat at me, told me to get a life and then get earplugs. Thus it became my responsibility to take action to mitigate her antisocial behaviour. I see no difference between that and being told now, by you, that it’s my responsibility to not subscribe to blog aggregators because you’ve just flooded them with spam. Very community-spirited of you.

  7. Howard: I am constantly amazed how you can spout such drivel and expect other people to believe it. I can write what I want on my blog. I don’t send it to anyone or force anyone to read it. This is completely different to me sending you an email and forcing you to have to delete it. Trying to liken this to email or personal stereos just highlights how delusional you are.

    If I had personally asked all the blog aggregators to include my posts then wrote a load of stuff to cause a problem, maybe you would have a case, but since I didn’t you haven’t. If I decide I want to write 1,000 posts a day on complete random guff that is my business. If a blog aggregator chooses to aggregate my content, it’s totally nothing to do with me. Stopping being an ass and admit you are totally out of your depth!

    Cheers

    Tim…

  8. Howard…

    I do believe you’re a five year old, no matter what else you might have published… which may be fact or fiction, I have no way of knowing.

    All I have to go on are your comments, which really paint a very clear picture of you as a miserable whinging sod, sorry if that’s not entirely correct, but your public persona is all that I see.

    Different type of spam as well, I don’t really have a problem with the “lighter” moments that sweep through the news aggregator like a wave… or even the less relevant technical ones (did the 11g release really interest me? no. Did it take up 90% of OracleNA for the best part of a month? yes.) The one I do have a probelm with is the repeated “buy your pills here” spam that automatically gets blasted into older blog posts. Once I get some bandwidth to figure out why the Captcha solution I was trying to install is failling on a perl call then I’ll re-enable comments, until then people need to get a Typekey, as that’s the only authenticaiton I can put in place that’s working and doesn’t need me to babysit it too much!

    One, you will learn the meaning of the word “relevant” as it applies to your comments as it appears both on this post, and on Tim’s later post, that you aimlessly meander off into worlds of your own understanding on a whim, unfortunately those worlds have little connection to the world that the rest of us participate in.

    Mind you, life would be so much more boring without bizzarre clowns like you, so please keep it up πŸ™‚

    Best wishes,

    Graham

  9. Graham: I agree. Having people like Howard around brightens up my day. If his blog were available, you would see I was one of the people who responded with a “keep going” message when he posted his, “My hit rates are low and nobody appreciates me so I’m going to turn off all my sites” blog post.

    Over the years I’ve received many private emails complaining about Howard, especially this week. Most of the time I find myself defending his rather eccentric behavior. I think he’s capable of adding considerably to the Oracle community. I also know he is capable of embarrassing himself by showing what a complete ass he is.

    I hope he doesn’t try to use these incidents as a reason for giving up, but then this type of self-harm is part of his nature.

    Cheers

    Tim…

  10. Yeah. People still use stones and lbs for weight over here most of the time. People often talk about kilos in the gym, then state their weight in stones… Strange. πŸ™‚

    Cheers

    Tim…

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