SELECT * FROM MySQL.Conference LIMIT 12,6

record 12
Wednesday afternoon and I’m taking the MySQL Core Certification exam. This exam is recommended for people who have one month of experience working with MySQL. There is also a “Professional” exam, for those with six months of experience. There is a bit of chatter that the Core exam is more difficult than the Professional (and being Core certified is a prerequisite for Professional).
I had to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement to take the exam. As part of the terms and conditions:

I will not copy, disclose, publish or transmit to any person or entity any details of any Certification Exam, or information pertaining to it, in any form or by any means.

Standard NDA stuff, and meaningless. I can’t disclose information pertaining to the exam in any form or by any means? So I shouldn’t reveal to anyone that I have ever taken the certification exam, or that I have even heard of it.
My exam number was MY001003B0073890.

record 13
Somebody was talking about “storytelling”. This has become a business term, where the actual day-to-day operations of a business are so complicated that consultants must resort to high-level “stories” to talk about what is going on. A story is a sales pitch, a quarterly report, a deposition.
I’m uncomfortable with the use of storytelling to summarize the actions of, say, a million individual actions. Say you have a business where you make a dollar every time someone clicks on an ad on your web page. The story of how users are able to find what they want on our website is too far removed from the individual acts of one million people clicking on ads. There is no such “user” that “finds what they want”. I guess my problem with business stories is that I find the characters to be unrealistic.
record 14
When you do a SELECT query, which is what you do when you want to see all of the records/files/data that match what you are looking for, you can limit the number of records that are returned with the LIMIT command. If LIMIT is followed by one number, that is the number of records to display. If there are two numbers separated by a comma, the first is the offset. When you select records but do not order them in any way, the records are returned in the order they are found by the database. This order may change between subsequent SELECT queries, so be careful to order the results when this is likely to occur.
record 15
On Tuesday night I had dinner with Rawson and his wife Jen. I have not spoken to or seen Rawson since 1989, and even then we had little social contact. I mostly know Rawson from the early 80’s as the cool kid who had tons of Atari games which he got for free because he wrote a newspaper column called “Video Beat” that was syndicated all over the country. I think the last game I borrowed from him was Below the Root, made by Windham Classics.
Anyway, the three of us went to a Cuban restaurant in downtown San Jose. The waitress nearly spilled soup all over the table. Then we went to the Bennigan’s next to the hotel where I’m staying. They used to live in Los Angeles, not far from where I’d been living. One day Rawson got mugged and decided it was time to leave the city.
We had a nice conversation, which of course was colored by the nostalgia of catching up with a a childhood friend. You trade stories, and then those stories require background stories, and you edit them down more and more as you go. There was a girl who came to my birthday party about five years ago, and she was also from my home town, though I didn’t particularly recognize her. I got quite drunk and boisterous from a bottle of tequila. My friend knows her better than I do, and he had heard about the party, but didn’t provide any details.
record 16
I finished my epic fantasy novel by Robin Hobb. I made the unfortunately choice of bringing a copy of Robert Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre as a backup book, which is not something to be read on an airplane. At the San Jose Airport market, I browsed the suspense/thriller section. Most of it was dreck,

Harrison looked at his watch. It was 5:30 and his sister was late again. He didn’t expect her to be on time, but on this day he was more impatient than usual.
He saw her enter through the revolving doors of the hotel. She work a dark blue blazer, and her medium length brown hair was held back with a tortoishell barrette that she always wore.
“Have I got a surprise for you,” she said, smiling, as she approached him.
“Not as big a surprise as I’ve got for you. The blueprints are missing, and Doddy is being held by the Italian police.”

I note with dismay that Dean R. Koontz has continued to grow in popularity. His uber-dreck book The Bad Place has been reprinted, and is for sale at an airport near you. I’m still thinking of the best way to dispose of my copy.
record 17
Do you know the way to San Jose?