Today is January 6, which is “Old Christmas” in many parts of the world. In Ireland, January 6 is observed as “Little Christmas“. The Feast of Epiphany may or may not be January 6 – it depends. But the tradition of “Old Christmas” is always observed on January 6.
January 6 is also the day my grandfather passed away, twenty-seven years ago today, a day I’ll never forget. He was born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on December 25 – Christmas Day – and at his funeral, I heard some of the folks there in South Carolina remark that he was born on “New Christmas” and passed away on “Old Christmas”.
My grandfather was James Demery, and he was a great man. And he played electric guitar a lot like Vince Gill plays in this video, a fact I didn’t know for years, even after I’d picked up the guitar myself at ten years old. And whenever i think of gospel music like this – which I love – I often think of my grandfather.
I don’t generally post on Sunday, but this isn’t just any Sunday, not to me. So for today, here’s a unique video. This is perhaps the best performance of one of the greatest hymns ever – Carrie Underwood singing “How Great Thou Art”, with Vince Gill on guitar.
For more about Old Christmas, see:
Old Christmas Day – “in some parts of Great Britain people still call the 6th of January, Old Christmas Day”
Old Christmas Celebration – “Does The Twelve Days of Christmas sound familiar? These twelve days of feasting, and merrymaking ended on January 6th or “Twelfth Night” with a grand celebration.”
Little Christmas – “one of the traditional names in Ireland for January 6”
I had the fortunate opportunity to attend last week’s football game between my favorite team, the Washington Redskins, and our longtime rival, the Dallas Cowboys. The Redskins were victorious, amazingly enough, and we’re all looking forward to going to the playoffs this week, something that hasn’t happened in quite a while.
I was digging around for some old Redskins performance records and stumbled on this fascinating piece of history I’d never heard before, found at Wikipedia page titled Cowboys-Redskins Rivalry“:
In December 1961, an unknown number of Cowboys fans sneaked into D. C. Stadium, armed with bags of chicken feed. When Alaskan snow dogs were to drag Santa Claus onto the field during the halftime show, the pranksters would unleash dozens of hungry chickens onto the field – 75 white, one black. The significance of the black chicken was to symbolize how [Redskins owner George Preston] Marshall was the only owner in the league who would not recruit an African-American football player; Marshall stating, “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” [1]
If you’re looking for a great Christmas gift for a special someone, you might consider the new “Twitter dress”. The BBC did a three and a half minute video showing it in action. The “Twitter dress” displays an animated series of controllable lights in various displays of an LED style of lights, with the capability of displaying tweets or other messages received in real time. It also can take photos.
The name “Twitter dress” comes from the London launch event of the new 4G service of UK mobile network Everything Everywhere. The launch event featured Nicole Scherzinger, the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. (Some still blame Nicole for the breakup of the band, but that’s another story.) Scherzinger’s dress drew a great deal of attention at the EE 4G launch, with its flashing lights and ability to display tweets in real time, and triggered a lot of buzz in the Twitterverse during the live event. This all just happened in November, so we’ll see if the name “Twitter dress” sticks, but for now, that’s what it seems to be known as.
I first saw a wearable computer at COMDEX in the 1990’s in Las Vegas. A company called Xybernaut seemed to be leading the field. I remember exiting the COMDEX convention one night, and finding a “booth babe” standing just outside of the convention center. Imagine a vast concerete and stone patio, under the dark night desert sky, with the balmy warm breezes of Nevada gently blowing. In the distance were the lights of the convention center in one direction, the lights of the casinos in another direction, but standing between them on the patio, a surreal tall cylinder, about ten feet high, cut open on one side, and looking like a Star Trek-style teleporter device, large enough for only one person to stand in. A few dramatic beams of light shown straight down from the inside ceiling of the cylinder, down through the dark onto the person standing inside, who was just waiting there for whoever might happen to walk by as they exited the convention – as I was doing. She was a pretty model, of course, with long flowing hair, dressed in a form-fitting costume like Batgirl from the 1968 Batman TV series, complete with a utility belt to house her wearable CPU, as well as storage and other devices, with a fascinating monocle over one eye for her heads-up display (HUD), and a tiny joystick in her left hand, like something you might use to operate an old racing slot-car. I found the monocle a bit hard to use, I could tell it would take getting used to, but I thought the potential was fascinating. It was one of the more compelling displays I’ve seen at technical conference, as you may have surmised by now. But it was also the last time I saw anything about wearable computers at a technical conference. I think the rise of mobile devices made the wearable computer concept a bit irrelevant.
But is that changing now? With new advances in the miniaturization of cameras, displays, controllers, and other devices, and the widespread adaptation of hand-held devices – and therefore public acceptance of these products – we may soon see the “Twitter dress” and other developments gain traction with end-users. I think it’s inevitable that technology will merge with clothes, fashion, and other forms of personal expression and interactive communication.
1. What do you call a cow that’s just had a baby? Decalfinated.
2. What do you call an exploding ape? A baboom.
3. What do you call a snake who is employed by the government? A civil serpent.
4. What do you call a hippy’s wife? Mississippi.
5. What do you call bears without ears? B.
6. What do you call the shortest distance between 2 jokes? A straight line.
7. What do you call a blind dinosaur? A Doyouthinkhesawus.
8. What do you call a parrot when it has dried itself after taking a bath? Polly unsaturated.
9. What do you call a cat who ate a duck? A duck-filled-fatty-puss.
10. What do you call a cat that tells jokes? A witty kitty.
11. What do you call a person who draws amusing pictures of motor vehicles? A car-toonist.
12. What do you call a rooster who wakes you up at the same time every morning? An alarm cluck.
13. What do you call a lady magician? Trixie.
14. What do you call a crazy spaceman? An astronut.
15. What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.
16. What do you call a veterinary surgeon with laryngitis? A hoarse doctor.
17. What do you call a snake that becomes a Canadian law officer? Mountie Python.
18. What do you call a rabbit who is really cool? A hip hopper.
19. What do you call a butterfingered nurse? A medicine dropper.
20. What do you call a fake noodle? An Impasta.
21. What do you call the best butter on the farm? A goat.
22. What do you call a song sung in a car? A car-tune.
23. What do you call something lying at the bottom of the ocean and twitching? A nervous wreck.
24. What do you call two guys from Mexico playing basketball? Juan on Juan.
25. What do you call a camel with no humps? Humphrey.
And yes, what I say above is true – this is the winner of the FIRST annual Cartesian Product Challenge! More on that soon, in the meantime, to all my American colleagues, a very happy Thanksgiving!
Here’s a little background on this video: this was shot at the Oracle Open World Certification Lounge, in the Moscone Center, on Monday, October 1, 2012. However – it wasn’t really planned. I was there to do a question-and-answer session with Oracle Open World attendees on issues pertaining to certification in general, and the SQL Expert exam in particular. The outstanding Carey Hardey made a lot of the arrangements, and the fantastic Harold Green of Oracle Corp. was there as well – he does Oracle TV spots for the company and had an impressive setup in the back of the room. I’d already brought up the idea of making the announcement of the Cartesian Product Challenge winner there, and Harold and Carey were both supportive of it, and when I was there, Harold had the idea of filming it. So I made some notes on my iPad (that’s what you see me glancing down to read) and grabbed some coffee, and with maybe five minutes of prep, we shot it. Harold is equipped with a tremendous portable recording system, complete with a high quality camera and excellent lighting system, and you can see the results above.
A few minutes later, we shot a second video for the Meet the Author series, which I’ll post tomorrow. After that, Harold folded up shop and was gone within about five minutes, to travel a few blocks and set up all over again for another shoot – I think that was scheduled to be at the nearby companion conference, JavaOne.
Oracle Open World, Day 2, in the bright sunlight overlooking downtown San Francisco:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey! This is Steve, its Day 2 – actually, no, it’s Day 3 of the Oracle conference. But I’m going to tell you about Day 2, because it’s Day 3 in the morning, the sun’s just coming up, and it’s bright in here, I’m not blind, it’s just bright in here. So I thought I’d put on the sunglasses, because I’m really hip that way.
Anyway, good morning, this is Steve, and I’m on the 39th floor of a hotel in downtown San Francisco, here for the Oracle Open World Conference 2012. I’m overlooking the downtown area where most of the conference is taking place. So let me share with you something that you – that probably won’t make the news, you probably won’t hear about this, there’s a lot of talk about the keynotes, CNBC is interviewing folks here, you can see all that elsewhere, let me share something with you I don’t think you’ll hear anywhere else. The magic phrase is “software defined network”, or SDN. There is a lot of buzz about it here in Silicon Valley, and Oracle quietly is working away on this. I was in two separate meetings where this came up. And one person told me that recently VMware paid 1.2 billion dollars – billion dollars- for a company of 20 people with less than 10 million dollars in revenue. For this, VMware paid $1.2 billion, just to get the SDN assets. (Speaking of the bright sun – ) Wow, that’s bright. That’s bright!
Anyway, Oracle’s working away on this as well. And the idea is to create something of a hypervisor for networks, the same way a hypervisor works for virtualized operating systems. And I would say that the most important thing that I heard probably the whole day, was one key person told me – who’s involved with the effort, involved with the process at Oracle, said to a small gathering of us: “everyone is talking about it, nobody understands it”.
Anyway, there’s more to share, about the events, the presentation, the exhibit hall, the parties, uh, but, um, you can get that information elsewhere, and quite frankly, I’m working, I’ve been here working away, and so I haven’t participated in everything, and besides, there’s too much, there’s so much cool stuff going on.
Here’s my video report from Oracle Open World 2012, Day 1. A full transcript follows.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is Steve, it is Monday, October 1st, 2012, and I am here, at they uh – I’m in my hotel room, at the Oracle Open World conference here in San Francisco. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made a big announcement last night at the keynote session opening the conference. It was about Oracle’s latest cloud computing offerings, and as I listened to him last night in Hall D of the Moscone Center, I was thinking – you know, I know the media is going to bash him for being a hypocrite. Sure enough, The Wall Street Journal this morning reported the following:
After once dismissing cloud computing as “gibberish,” Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced three new features for its cloud computing service at a customer conference in San Francisco.
And Doug Henschen at InformationWeek blogged about this today:
The irony of seeing Larry Ellison extol the virtues of cloud computing, in-memory computing, and multitenancy after so many memorable attacks on earlier versions of these technologies offered by rivals was indeed rich.
I don’t think the slams against Larry Ellison are warranted. It’s true that he’s bashed certain implementations of what we now call cloud computing, but I think his intent has been to warn against immature implementations of these technologies in services that didn’t offer the robustness, the security, the stability, the standards-based architectures and other kind of features that are typical with a more mature, professional platform along the lines of the Oracle relational database management system.
But one part of Ellison’s keynote on Sunday night really resonated with me. Ellison reminded the audience that he first advocated cloud computing in the 1990s. Well I heard some people in the audience snicker when he said that. But snickerers, I’m here to tell you – it’s true. He did advocate cloud computing in the 1990’s, I know he did. I wrote about it, in a publication that came out in 1998.
The publication was titled Oracle8 Server Unleashed. It’s a compilation work consisting of several dozen chapters contributed to by about 40 authors. My chapter was about Oracle’s Web Application Server 3.0, and a concept known as Network Computing Architecture, or NCA. The goal of NCA was to remove all software off of your computer, and put it into the network. This was consistent with a concept that was being advocated by Sun Microsystems. The phrase “the network is the computer” was the phrase that summarized this. In fact, I think it was even Sun’s official corporate slogan for a while. Friends, this was cloud computing, but the term “cloud computing” had not been coined yet. This was the 1990’s. In my chapter of Oracle8 Server Unleashed, I wrote the following:
Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of the Oracle Corporation, has frequently mused at what life would be like if common household appliances had the same complexity of maintenance as a PC. For example, you never hear someone say something like “Sorry, I can’t go out tonight, I’m staying home so I can upgrade my TV to version 7.0”. Nobody has to go to training class to learn how to use their microwave oven. Nobody has to get a refrigerator adapter when they find out their latest leftovers aren’t compatible with their existing refrigerator. Yet computer users deal with these issues all the time. Software that runs on a Mac won’t run on a PC. Upgrading from one version of Windows to another is a significant effort. Ellison’s argument is that this is unacceptable, and that in order for computer technology to reach the masses, the PC must become as easy to use as any common household appliance.
And I continued:
In a recent presentation to a Japanese IT convention, Ellison was asked by a member of the audience if the network will be stable enough – won’t it crash from time to time? Isn’t it risky to place so much dependence on the network? Ellison’s response was to ask the audience member another question: what is the last thing that crashed on you: your telephone, or Windows 95? The audience roared with laughter, making the answer obvious. Yes, a network can experience problems once in a rare while, but when a network is maintained by a professional technical staff on a full-time basis, then the burden of the rote, technical system maintenance is lifted off of the consumer, who can spend her time focusing on her actual work…
The number of networks we already depend on is impressive: plumbing, electricity, highways, television, radio, — all networks professionally run by others, that consumers use frequently, yet do not worry about personally maintaining, upgrading, or troubleshooting. Why should a computer user experience anything different?”
So when Larry Ellison stood on that stage on Sunday night, and when he reminded his audience that he’s been long advocating utility computing – the old name for what we now call “cloud computing” – I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Today’s headlines should not have read that Larry Ellison finally embraces cloud computing. No. That’s not what it should’ve been. The proper headline today should’ve been:
Cloud computing has finally caught up to Larry Ellison, who has advocated the concept longer than anyone else in leadership in Silicon Valley today.
So folks, I’m here at the Oracle conference, I’ll have more information to share, we’ll see if we do some more later.
The late Phil Lynott of the rock band Thin Lizzy was an Irish musician and the voice behind the song I consider to be Thin Lizzy’s biggest hit, The Boys Are Back In Town. Of all the songs from that timeframe, that’s one that runs through my head all the time, a great song. Lynott passed away in 1986, at the young age of 37, quite a loss. There’s a great bio of him on Wikipedia, and it includes a great photo of a statue built to memorialize Lynott in front of the Bruxelles club on Harry Street, Dublin, Ireland.
Here’s a live performance of Boys by Lynott and Thin Lizzy:
