Carl Backstrom's Blog

Begin PSA.

This is a quick heads up , if you haven't checked the blogs you link to lately and you link to anything on orablogs.com you might want to remove or change that link.

orablogs.com isn't what you think it is anymore ;)

While the first click through is "probably" SFW any link or popup after that is probably NSWF.

Stupid link farms.


End PSA.

Yup I guess it's my turn this blogtagging thing seems to have taken off, I figured it would get to me at some point , thanks John you know we have some deadlines here right ;).

1. I have a 15 year old daughter and I am 34 years , so if you do the math I started pretty young, fortunately she's much smarter and prettier than her old man, hand codes her HTML , uses the GIMP for artwork , is a cheerleader , snowboards very well, and is savvy enough to IM or call me for all her homework research needs. And if your reading this kid you better be done with your homework!!!

2. I'm a snowboarding fanatic but growing up in Southern California we didn't have that nice soft powdery snow or huge scenic bowls to people seem to like so much. What we had was big jumps and an awesome snowboard park so you'll find me doing 50/50's on the rails and getting big grabs on the table tops. Nowadays I wear a helmet but still seem to get concussed about once a season, so if you see me 5 feet in the air upside down with snowboard on my feet, just keep watching or grab a camera something bad/funny is about to happen.

3. From the age of 8-13 I lived in a windowless shack , as in windows with no glass, on the back acre of a 5 acre farm, well I got windows in when I was 10 ,happy times! The rest of my family lived in a very nice two story house but I had three sisters and they got the rooms in the house. So the answer to 'Were you born in a barn?" or "What did you live in a barn growing up?" the answer is pretty much "Yup".

4. I have a degree in Geography from San Francisco State University, and specialized in GIS and Remote Sensing. I worked for several environmental consulting firms and did things like work on the Presidio Rehabilitation , South Bay Salt Ponds, saving the California Tiger Salamander, and killing Egeria densa in the Bay Delta. I was actually a CS major for most of university and only had a 17 units to go but they were all math classes and I loath math, maybe someday I'll go back just to finish up.

5. After high school I went straight to the construction industry and was planning on doing that for a career. After a couple years on a very hot day (115 f) doing roofing in Lake Elsinore, Ca I decided ,right then and there, to go back to school. Was a waiter for 20 minutes once as well, suffice to say I don't have the temperament for it.

6. I polevaulted all through high school and college, yeah people actually hold on to a stick run full speed put the stick in a hole in the ground and hang on. Hopefully though you land in the pit (the landing pads), and not in box (the cement and metal hole you put the stick in), otherwise you'll end up with torn tendons and ankles that ache in cold weather.

7. You can tell a lot about a person by their favorite quotes....

'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...''

-- Isaac Asimov

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He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."

-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

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Godzilla hates infrastructure.

-- Unknown

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We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.

-- Maurice Maeterlinck

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The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

-- Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV

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"Everything in moderation -- including moderation."

-- Harvey Steiman.

8. Every internet / web development job I've ever had in some shape or form has been from craigslist. Oracle actually hired me directly from a craigslist posting, go figure.


And there you go 8 random and hopefully interesting and educating facts about me. So looking around at some people I should tag and haven't at least posted that they have been tagged, So I have 6

Kris Rice , Tyler Muth , Sergio Leunissen, Marc Sewtz , Christian Shay , Kuassi Mensah


EDIT:

There has been a bit of a backlash on the blogtagging thing and truthfully it's not fully out of place, sometimes these things get a life of there own and get out of hand.

http://www.dizwell.net/prod/archives/57

But truthfully I like putting a personal face on things, sometimes I think we all forget there is a person/people on then end of that blog or developing/selling/marketing/researching that product and a bit of lightheartedness , especially in the beginning of the new year is not a bad thing. Sure if this happens everyday i think we will all have a big problem with it. But just once , or even once a year I think helps everybody.

My 2 cents.
Carl

Looks like Oracle has an official wiki now.

http://wiki.oracle.com/

I was even able to use my OpenID to login.

So I went ahead and added an Application Express entry.

http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Application+Express

Have at it !

So someone sent me a link from the Internet Archive for something and I was like hey I want to look at my old sites. Though it looks like the Internet Archive misses quite a bit of the images and flash files but still there was a pretty amazing amount still around.


meetingdoodle.com < I think the name is description enough, a php application that would allow people to upload and comment on the doodles they did in meetings, it would automatially thumbnail and organize them.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010306164224/http://www.meetingdoodle.com/

I have all these images somewhere around 30-40 of them and will have to put them up.


And loungetank.com which has always been my catch all site for anything I want to do, and yes I still have it and no you can't have it because it's mine and I still like the name!

loungetank.com is now APEX based and hosted on shellprompt.com , though there is nothing there for public consumption at moment.

But the stuff that used to be on loungetank is still awesome, at least to me.

There is the alpha of the Geo News Reader I mentioned in my 5 years at Oracle post.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020325231905/www.loungetank.com/geo_news.html the actual running version was much more elaborate, the layout kinda looks like the APEX Object Browser doesn't it :).

And look at at all the different front pages I went through. Since almost everything was built on Cocoon and I was really into building XSLT's

http://web.archive.org/web/20011201045448/http://www.loungetank.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20030201210450/http://www.loungetank.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20030530085533/http://www.loungetank.com/

I still have most of this stuff on ZIP disks (remember those!!!) and now I'm going to have to dig through them to see what I can bring back even for just fun.

Anyway if you've ever had a site that you just kinda forgot about or changed so radically it's not the same site you should take a look for it in the Internet Archive, it pretty interesting seeing all the differences.

I use Google Reader as my only RSS reader and absolutely love it since I bounce around from computer to computer to phone.....

As quite a few other people have pointed out today ,
http://oracleappslab.com/2007/09/06/google-reader-updates/
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/09/we-found-it.html

Google Reader now has search (among other things), but the thing I mainly care about is the search and it has already been helpful.

David Peake the Application Express PM has joined the blogging community with his blog.

Drop by and say hello and hassle him for some posts.

A nice article with tagging guidelines, even I don't/won't follow them all the time but is something to think about when tagging data.

http://tagamac.com/2007/07/best_practices/

So while looking around the OTN Tech Blog.

I randomly found a link to this site http://oracleappslab.com/ and from there an internal site at Oracle described here they have some interesting stuff and actually use the phrase "Web 2.0" the way it is supposed to be used, not to describe the technology but to describe the social / collaborative aspect.

It's not APEX but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on whats happening in that space if for no other reason than to borrow someone else's good idea ;).

I've added some statistic counter links from statcounter.com to my blog and to my OTN examples application. I'm using the free service which only tracks detailed stats on the last 100 visitors. It's pretty neat seeing some of the statistic's of how people are using my different sites.

This isn't all just for fun and games though I'm actually going to use the stats I get for something useful. People have complained (from time to time) that some of my examples aren't really step by step howto's but are more random code drops, which is what they are meant to be. But it does make sense to create howto's on the more popular examples if for no other reason than to make it easier for people just starting off in APEX or in integrating APEX with more client side features a better start.

Hopefully it will help with some of my documentation skills as well, which is why I only do code drops in first place ;).

Feel free to browse the statistic's as I've made them public. I personally like the maps of where people are accessing my site from.

Map for OTN Examples
Map for carlback.blogspot.com

I've added a couple new Blog links in the last couple days.

Tyler Muth has just started up his Oracle blog. Tyler used to be a developer on Application Express, and I know still keeps his hands dirty with APEX development here and there, plus he's the one that pointed me towards my new and super cool mobile phone. I look forward to his postings especially when they hype up APEX.

I've also added links to Kuassi Mensah's blog and Christian Shay's blog. Kuassi is the PM for JVM in the database and Christian is the PM for .Net with Oracle, I shared a demo pod with them at Collaborate 07 and they are very nice and very smart guys so if you are interested in either of those technologies take a look at their sites.

There's a new APEX blog in the wild! Marc Sewtz a member of the APEX Development team has started his blog here. http://marcsewtz.blogspot.com/index.html

Stop by and say hello.