OK, time for me to vent a little. Oracle is a terrific database company, I won’t take that from them, but they are a terrible customer support company. We pay over $20K a year for our customer support contract with them, and for that, we get tech support cases that are ignored or closed without consulting with us, orders for new software that just go unfilled, and pretty terrible tech support agents to boot. I told them today that they are one bad call away from me migrating completely to Microsoft SQL Server; I don’t know that the support will be any better on that side of things, but I do know that I cannot spend this kind of money on Oracle and get the terrible service that I do.

Quick update before I hop on the plane home: the interviews went great. UNC has a pretty top-notch pediatrics residency program, with some incredible teachers, motivated residents, and interesting patient population; they also are currently building a brand spankin’ new freestanding children’s hospital that is planned to be open around this time next year. And in the something-I-hadn’t-anticipated department, schools are seemingly very interested in potential residents with strong computer backgrounds. I really should have been able to guess that, but I never really thought about it.

You know this guy was just doing it to see if he could. Really, there’s no other explanation.

AAAARGH! It just hit me that, due to my flight and pre-interview stress, I completely forgot that Law & Order was on last night. Was it a new one? If you saw it, please let me know!

Is anyone else as chapped as I am about the judge who has placed a ban on the release of judges’ disclosure information? It appears that this man is all for the release of the information when it isn’t going to be all that useful, but when it comes to someone wanting to put it closer to the hands of everyday citizens, he’s against that. Should judges be allowed to be in charge of the decisions about things this closely related to their own personal interests?

So, one day a few weeks back, the air conditioners in our brand-spankin’ new server room here decided that they didn’t like to be on all the time, so they conked out. And the temperature got to somewhere around 140 degrees. Not good. I then went shopping around, and found the coolest little gadget ever, the Hot Little Therm. Made by SpiderPlant, it’s just a little box that attaches to your serial port; out of it come one-plus thermometer probes. Programming the thing is a dream; I now have a machine that feeds temperatures every minute into my Oracle database, and a web page that gives me up-to-the-minute temperature readings as well as varied highs and lows. Pretty swank, and completely trouble-free. I recommend this thing highly.