The State Of My Blog

I’ve had a few blogs in my head the last few months but haven’t had a chance to write them up. This is partly affected by the release cycle at work, and some extra-curricular volunteer work, but mostly by the birth of our second child.

[Warning: the next paragraph is not Oracle-related – skip ahead to the following paragraph if you like…]

Daniel’s arrival has probably affected our home routine more than Chloe’s did; at least with Chloe there was only one child requiring attention at any given moment; now there’s two kids screaming and during the week Daddy’s away at work for 10+ hours a day, so Rosalie’s got to handle it all by herself. The pressure isn’t helped much when one or more of us falls sick; last week Chloe and I were beset with headaches and fever, and while we’re almost recovered now, Daniel has started getting blocked up and having trouble sleeping. To top it all off Rosalie’s a bit under the weather as well. The cold and wet weather here in Perth has probably been a contributor – we’ve had temperature ranges as low as 8-17 degrees (Celsius)!

Yet another contributor to my lack of blogging activity was a fair amount of involvement in the State Youth Games earlier this month; this took a lot of my time, especially throughout May. Soon, I’ll blog about the Oracle APEX-driven web site I created for our team, partly on my non-Oracle blog [EDIT: since removed] and on this blog. The most interesting part of that was learning how to allow connections directly to my http server at home.

With all that excitement, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with all the blogging out there, which was massively helped with my home-grown RSS reader. It is also an Oracle APEX-driven web site for my private use, it regularly polls all my RSS feeds, downloads them to my computer, and keeps track of which ones I’ve read yet. RSS items that have enclosures (e.g. Rocketboom) are downloaded as well, so when I’m ready to watch or listen to them there’s less delay. At the moment I’ve got some hard-coded rules that automatically mark some items as “not interesting”, but eventually I hope to implement some kind of guided learning so that it will be able to mark new items as “probably interesting” or “probably not interesting” based on my feedback on prior items. Even with the hard coded rules, however, it cut down my reading time by about 50% which is nice. A few months ago the database had over 1,000 unread items; over the last few weeks I’ve managed to whittle that down quite a bit, and when I was sick I read the last few so now I’m fully up to date – e.g. Oracle 11g is on its way! 🙂 I can barely wait to get that installed.

That’s the State Of My Blog(s). I hope you enjoyed that because I normally avoid blogging-about-blogging like the /*TODO: insert cliche*/.

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