I admit it, I read the 2010 equivalent of dime store novels.  I love Simon Scarrow's "Eagle" books, and I follow Bernard Cornwell's The Grail Quest and The Saxon Stories.  I also read Stephen R. Donaldson's
Thomas Covenant chronicles.  My complaint is that I've devoured the books and now I've nothing left to read.  Scarrow's Gladiator is out on Amazon, but I will wait for my birthday to buy it.  Cornwell doesn't have anything coming out soon and Donaldson's next book isn't due until October.

I think I'll reread The Ten Thousand.  Steven Pressfield doesn't seem to have anything in the works, although Killing Rommel is worth reading three or four times.  The fall may be filled with the readings of new authors as I branch out.

I've been working on a project, utilizing Oracle XE in a VMWare machine for database development.  The project has been rocking along properly, without hitches or hiccups on Oracle XE.  I began to move the system over to a full Oracle 10g database server on Friday.

My scripts ran without error on the staging server, and I had my databases built in maybe two hours.  I copied over the aspx pages and cs files and the application was up in another hour after I tweaked some code.

Then my troubles started as soon as I began unit testing.  My Oracle queries were taking forever to execute!  I mean forever.  Queries utilizing the same data on the Oracle XE server were completing in 3 to 4 seconds.  The same query on the 10g staging server was taking almost 30 minutes.  Absolutely amazing.

I ran the Oracle ODT query analyzer that ships with the 11h client and was hit with a "You must have a valid license... yakkity yakiity whatever message."  All I knew was we didn't have the license.  So now, I get to explain to my boss that something that was supposed to happen quickly is not going to happen quickly unless some sort of solution from heaven falls to earth and lands on my server.

I normally like working with Oracle databases and programming in PL/SQL. But, events like what happened Friday definitely dampen my enthusiasm.

I have to admit, taking time away from blogging and working on code in the evenings has been a real eye opener.

I've lost about six pounds this month.  Mostly its due to some serious work in my backyard in 100° F heat in the afternoons and early evening.  (Part of my sprinkler system has quit functioning and I am following lines from the non-working heads to the main feeder pipe.  The ground is rock hard, but the exercise has done wonders for me.)

I have also been reading a lot in the evening, instead of looking at DCDFLib code.

All of this adds up to much sounder sleep, and much better relationships, as I am spending much more time with my extended family.  I've also found that my efficiency at work has increased dramatically.

While this "vacation" has been worthwhile, it has also helped me to better understand my needs.  Taking a break to exercise and taking time to talk to other people is a neccessity, a true requirement for living life. (I don't classify email exchanges as true conversation.  For me, true conversation involves eye contact.)

As for summer, well, the first cold front passed through a couple of days ago.  We're down into the upper 80's and low 90's.  Should stay this way for a while and it is truly refreshing to walk out into my garden in the coolness of the morning.  But the weather forecasters say there is a good possibility the heat will return next week.  The dog days of summer are upon us. I am really looking forward to Indian summer.

From "Fatal Revenant", I list a couple of more fascinating words:

• innominate - having no name, nameless
• surquedry - arrogance, presumption, insolence

Where does the author find these words?  It must be an old and wonderous thesaurus filled with obsolete words.

Wow!  It finally happened.  I managed to compute a covariance matrix from "real world" data that was singular. The good news is that I found a failure in my row swapping logic for inverting a matrix.  The bad news is that no matter how I rearranged the rows of data, the determinant was always zero.

This just goes to show that singlular matrices may be rare in the "real world", but they do exist.  It also points out that my well thought out unit test wasn't.   The term "failed spectacularly" comes to mind.

This problem goes back to the drawing board for further analysis.