I'm sailing off into the sunset

Friends, I hope you're sitting down right now. I'm afraid I have some bad news. Recently there have been some complications with my lawyers and the public relations department, so I'm going to have to wrap things up here on this little blog. And in case you're wondering, yes, I know what you're thinking. I'm sorry it had to end this way, friends. But look on the bright side. Every time you make a phone call and purchase something with your credit cards, every time you make an appointment with your cosmetic surgeon and fire an employee at your corporation, chances are you'll be using an Oracle product. And every time you use an Oracle product, our paths will cross, if only briefly.

I'd like to thank you, dear readers, for all of the comments and email messages. And it would probably be a crime not to send shout-outs to the kind people at the San Jose Mercury News, MacSurfer, ZDNet, InfoWorld, and Oracle Apps Lab for all of the favorable press. And, of course, Zack Urlocker. I'll do my best to send free fake beta 12g databases out to everybody. Peace.

I just saved 7,532 houses

I think all of us have been touched by the fires burning outside Los Angeles and San Diego this week. In fact, I've lost a couple of my own properties down in Malibu. BTW, they're the same properties I wanted to tear down and rebuild, so it's no biggie. But listen. Just thinking about your entire home going up in smoke is enough to motivate anybody to help people in harm's way. I know if my Japanese gardens were on fire -- if all the azaleas and bamboo and Japanese maples and bonsai marijuana plants were going up in smoke -- I'd want somebody to come and help me. So I thought, what the heck? I told my aircraft guys to get in there and convert my C-130 into a tanker ASAP, and then I flew down to San Diego and doused some flames. I helped put out a fire or two, and then I went back and dropped a couple thousand Satanic Surfers CDs over Qualcomm Stadium.

I made a difference, which is more than most of you can say. I bet you lazy turds just sat in your leather armchairs and had the news about BEA Systems read to you by beautiful girls in bikinis while getting foot massages and facials. Am I right or am I right? Shame on you freaks.

Dear Shit for Brains...

I know you laughed at the iPhone and everything, but now 1995 is calling and it wants its phones back. As in, your phones, Stevie. All of those devices running Windows are out, bro. The people spoke yesterday. They want technology that actually works. They want phones that can actually make phone calls without crashing. People would rather use rotary phones that your Winphones. Yes, I know you're shocked.

CNET cheerleaders go apeshit for MySQL

This time they're citing a survey by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and claiming that our users "go ga-ga for open source, including MySQL." Which I guess stands to reason if you only read the first two paragraphs of the survey and then ignore everything else. Like the part where people say that they would never use MySQL for anything other than testing because it's insecure, unsupported, and "typically not used for mission-critical applications."

Tell you what, CNET. Why don't you start using MySQL on your production webservers and stop repeating verbatim what you hear from MySQL's Vice President of Products? Then maybe you'll sound less like an infomercial and more like an actual news source. Maybe.

Carl Icahn, pull my finger

When I was heli-skiing in Jackson Hole last week, I realized that the only thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly bear and her cubs is getting between Carl Icahn and a dollar bill. Seriously. Because here's the thing. A couple months ago we were thinking, holy cow, Carl fucking Icahn is buying up BEA Systems and the dude is ready to sell. Like, now. So I told Charles to throw an offer together and mail it in to BEA ASAP so we could pop the champaign, fire up the mechanical bull, and start rocking my boats. But then Carl said, well, uh, actually no, the offer isn't high enough, and could we please come back with a better offer? As if he really knows how these things work. And as if he's had a lot of luck with the businesses he's invested in recently. Like, um, Motorola and Time Warner. Ouch, Carl.

Anyway, I'm really happy articles like this one about Carl have started appearing around the blogosphere. This butthead needs to be called out and revealed for what he actually is: A little old man trying to play a game of monopoly with real businesses. And to be completely honest with you, that kind of board-game mentality might work in places like New York. Hell if I know. What I can tell you is nobody fucks with Larry Ellison and gets away with it. So, yeah. This isn't over, Icahn.

I have returned from the wilderness

Friends, I'm sorry about the lack of updates last week. I mean, I know this is a professional blog. And I also know a lot of stuff has gone down at Oracle over the last seven days. But let me tell you, last week was a totally crazy week for me personally. Man oh man. First there was the Oakland aerobatics show on Monday. Now, I'm not sure how many of you have flown a little prop plane 10 feet above the ground while stoned and drunk, but it really puts life and all of its challenges into perspective for you. There's nothing quite like playing chicken with telephone poles in a plane flying over four hundred miles per hour. And then on Tuesday, Steve came over to my house and we trimmed bonsai marijuana plants together and smoked a couple of joints and listened to Neil Young. Then I spent the rest of the week on my boat staring at the ocean and doing some soul searching. And you know what? I finally decided that I should have spent the week working at Oracle. Because honestly, I knew all along that it was just one of those weeks where I should have stayed home and taken care of little things, like firing John Wookey and closing the BEA Systems deal. Ah, well. As my hero Winston Churchill once said: never apologize, never explain.

We're a little disappointed about Doris Lessing

My wife Melanie really thought she was going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. Don't ask me why. I mean, all of her books have been out of print for years now. And even when they were still in print, the only people who read them were desperate stay-at-home-moms and gay men and horny teenage girls who kept vibrators under their mattresses. But she still thought she was going to win. I warned her. I told her she was cruising for a bruising. Before we got married I said, Melanie, only 11 women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 106 years. And she said that she knew that and she wasn't going to get her hopes up or anything. But did she listen to me? No, she did not. She started crying her eyes out last Friday when I was supposed to be closing the deal with BEA Systems. It sort of frigged everything up. Anyway, that's what I was this weekend -- a shoulder to cry on. You're jealous, I know.

Friends, forgive me

You woke up this morning and saw the news about our bid for BEA Systems and you thought, what the fuck? Larry lied to us a couple weeks ago when he said he didn't care about those Beaturds. He tricked us, didn't he? Well, yes. And friends, I know what you're thinking right now. Listen, I'm sorry about misleading you. Just believe me when I say that I really want to tell you what we're doing with BEA Systems. But all I can say right now is that I can't say much. It's just one of those things. So have a good weekend and try not to toilet paper my house or egg my Karmann Ghia, okay?

As if three Google jets weren't enough...

Larry and Sergey and Eric just had to get another one. See here. I called Eric this afternoon to verify. He said, yes, the rumors are true. Apparently Larry wanted all three of them to have their own planes so they could each fly one and have dogfights over LA, and he wanted this new 757 so he could fly it from home with a special version of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The best part about the 757 is that it runs on a special hybrid blend of dollar bills and ethanol. Larry's convinced that inflation is going to get so high in a couple months that the dollar won't be worth anything, so he wants to burn green backs to reduce the number of bills in circulation which will in turn help decrease inflation. Eric also said that passengers can actually fuel the aircraft while it's flying by sticking bills into the little plastic box right next to the stripper pole.

In the face of adversity, Red Hat tries to act natural

It's no secret that Shit for Brains thinks he owns Linux, or at least part of it. And it's also no secret that Red Hat thinks SFB is full of shit. But every couple months Stevie B. hints at an intellectual property lawsuit just to keep everybody on their toes. This time around, however, Red Hat says it isn't going to push back. They say they're just going to smile and nod and act like everything is normal. My lawyers are following the whole thing very closely. They say that Novell caving in was a good sign and that soon enough we'll be able to sue Microsoft for violating our patents. No joke. And we're talking large sums of money here, people. When you consider the fact that every computer running Windows has a little relational database inside, you'll see the scale of what I'm talking about. So we're almost ready to start entering into license negotiations with Microsoft. We think they should pay us about $10,000 per Windows installation. That's fair, right?

Jimbo's coming to town

Actually he's already been here for a while. But now he's moving the whole Wikimedia enchilada out here to the Valley. See here. I guess this means Wikipedia is out of the woods now, eh? Because last time I checked Jimbo was thinking about selling ads on encyclopedia pages. I think the real problem is that the dude can't get away from Wikipedia. He wants to be the next Bill Gates or whatever, but he just can't shake this rinky-dink non-profit he started. I hear that people always come up to the guy and call him the Wikipedia man. That and his rag-tag band of college student contributers always want him to speak at their schools. He must just hate that. And who can blame him? When you want to live on a sailboat with beautiful women hanging off each arm, you need money. Serious money. Money you're not going to be able to make with a non-profit organization. So I'm thinking about calling the guy. Maybe I'll invite him golfing and sailing and then offer him a job at Oracle. Either way, I'd like another friend. The guy's obviously smart, even if he does insist on using MySQL.

ZDNet's Michael Krigsman calls me out

Dude left a comment on one of my posts earlier today. Not sure, but I think he wanted to gently remind me of "Oracle's little payroll problem over at Arizona State University." Only it wasn't our problem, Mike. It was ASU's. Seriously. Because here's the thing. Sure we sell people software and support, but we aren't going to walk customers through every single itty-bitty little step. If they go and drop all of their tables by accident, that's not our fault. It's called operator error, Mike. Read our EULA. It doesn't cover mistakes made by blonde bimbos working as ASU interns who have freak-out moments whenever they break one of their nails. So you aren't going to get us on this one, bro. Nuh uh. Not going to happen. Talk to the hand, girlfriend.

This would make a great April Fools' Day joke

See here. Tom Yager over at InfoWorld says that we should all use Solaris when we can't use Mac OS X. He says that Solaris has all of the bloat of Windows Vista and none of the headaches associated with ease of use, and that's what makes it a great choice for people who aren't quite Mac people but don't want to be assimilated by Microsoft. Here's the best quote: "Solaris and OS X are both Unix, and if that's not enough, know that PowerBook, MacBook, and MacBook Pro are practically de facto choices among Sun's engineers." So if you're not sold on Solaris, the fact that Sun's engineers use it will seal the deal for sure.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. It doesn't make any sense to me either. And honestly, I'm kind of wondering whether Steve paid to have the article planted. He loves to fuck with the enterprise people.

Who needs an education anyway?

So by now you've probably read all about how SAP's shitty software basically shut down the entire Los Angeles school district. If not, see here. Apparently the administrators aren't yet sure whether the problem started with the MySQL database or the SAP installation. Anyway, now there's anarchy on the streets. Seriously. Kids are out of the classrooms and in the skate parks. They're listening to live punk bands instead of those dreary teachers. And thousands of these kids are talking to our Oracle recruiters. That's right people. As I write this, our dedicated employees are hitting the streets to find the little turd-droppers. We're calling it the A.S.S. (Application Support Services) initiative. Goes like this. We go out and find young tech-savvy individuals who want to make a difference. If they know about Linux, we give them our A.S.S. kit. It's a box full of things like condoms, Playboy magazines, O'Reilly programming books, a couple of marijuana joints to help them concentrate on the O'Reilly programming books, and a bunch of other information about open source projects. Because here's the thing. Those kids don't want to go to school their entire lives. They want to change the world and help people and do something meaningful. And what better way to change the world than to work on an open source project like Tomcat? Or maybe Fedora. Anything we can use and/or support.

I love Linus

But sometimes the dude can be as stubborn as a pack mule walking through Siberia in the dead of winter. Kind of like last week when he said, "You security people are insane," and then reiterated that he will add Smack to the Linux kernel. And that's cool. I mean, Linux is his dog and pony show. The problem is that Smack will probably bring a bunch of security vulnerabilities along with it.

People, this is exactly why I run OpenBSD on all of my servers at home. Those suckers are locked down. I keep them off the network, and I also have all the totally crazy shit to protect them. Fingerprint identification. Retinal scanners. Man traps. I'm telling you: The NSA has nothing on Larry's servers. Some people wonder why I go to the insane lengths I've gone to. Well, I'll tell you why. The truth is that you can never be too careful with your digital black book. Women's phone numbers are very, very important.