Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • How Many Have I Read?

    I saw this on Facebook, and while I’m not sure of the list, I reproduced it here. I think that an American list might have a few more books, like The Call of the Wild or White Fang on it. It’s definitely a Western survey as the Koran and Torah aren’t listed. No Heinlein, and a modern list might have Ender’s Game on there as well. Perhaps even The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

    Anyway, there are a few on here I think I might tackle, like Of Mice and men.

    Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

    Instructions:

    • Copy this into your NOTES.
    • Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
    • Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
    • Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

    I followed a friend’s note and used Xs. I’ve read 38 of these. Or recall having to read them.

    1.     Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
    2.     The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien     
    3. X  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
    4. x  Harry Potter series – JK Rowling      
    5. x  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
    6.     The Bible       
    7. x  Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte      
    8. x  Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell      
    9.     His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (all 3)    
    10. x  Great Expectations – Charles Dickens     
    11.     Little Women – Louisa M Alcott    
    12.     Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy    
    13. x   Catch 22 – Joseph Heller     
    14. x   Complete Works of Shakespeare – I bought this one year in college. I think I read them all, but hard to be sure.    
    15.      Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
    16. x   The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
    17.      Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk    
    18. x   Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger     
    19.      The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger    
    20.      Middlemarch – George Eliot    
    21.      Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell    
    22. x   The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald     
    23.      Bleak House – Charles Dickens    
    24. x   War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – In progress now, part IV
    25. x   The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams     
    26.      Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh    
    27. x   Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky     
    28. x   Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeckx    
    29. x   Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll     
    30.      The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame    
    31.      Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy    
    32.      David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
    33. x   Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis     
    34.      Emma -Jane Austen    
    35.      Persuasion – Jane Austen
    36. x   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis     
    37.      The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini    
    38.      Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres    
    39. x   Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
    40. x   Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
    41. x   Animal Farm – George Orwell
    42. x   The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown     
    43.       One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez    
    44. x    A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving     
    45.       The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins    
    46.       Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery    
    47.       Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy    
    48.       The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
    49. x    Lord of the Flies – William Golding     
    50.       Atonement – Ian McEwan    
    51.       Life of Pi – Yann Martel
    52. x    Dune – Frank Herbert     
    53.       Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons    
    54.       Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen    
    55.       A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth    
    56.       The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafonx   
    57.       A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens    
    58. x    Brave New World – Aldous Huxley     
    59.       The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon    
    60.       Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez    
    61.       Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck    
    62.       Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov    
    63.       The Secret History – Donna Tartt    
    64.       The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
    65. x    Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas     
    66.       On The Road – Jack Kerouac    
    67.       Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy    
    68. x    Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding     
    69.       Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdiex   
    70. x    Moby Dick – Herman Melville
    71. x    Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens     
    72. x    Dracula – Bram Stoker     
    73.       The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett    
    74.       Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson    
    75. x    Ulysses – James Joyce 
    76. x    The Inferno – Dante     
    77.       Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome    
    78.       Germinal – Emile Zola    
    79.       Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray    
    80.       Possession – AS Byatt
    81. x    A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens    
    82.       Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell    
    83.       The Color Purple – Alice Walker    
    84.       The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro    
    85.       Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert    
    86.       A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry    
    87. x    Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White     
    88.       The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom    
    89. x    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle     
    90.       The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton    
    91.       Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad    
    92.       The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery    
    93.       The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks    
    94.       Watership Down – Richard Adams    
    95.       A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole    
    96.       A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute    
    97.       The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas    
    98. x    Hamlet – William Shakespeare
    99. x    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl     
    100.       Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

  • What You Practice

    37slogo-transI saw a very interesting blog at 37 Signals on the quote “the things you do more often are the things you get good at.” It’s aimed more at a business model, talking about the idea of building a service for free without having an idea of how to later convert that to profit.

    However I think there is something else here. For most of us, outside of running our own business, the things we do most often are the things that we are interested in, or that speak to us. They are the things we like, and if we are self-aware, we recognize these things and look to build them into our life.

    Life is short, and your career is a big part of that. I recommend that you understand what you like to do, and then find a way to do more of it in your career. And enjoy your job more.

  • Coding With Music

    Lots of developers use headphones and music at work, though I think corporate life in cubes encourages this, just to block out the distractions. When the walls of your office stop at the 5 foot level, you might need all the privacy you can get from a large set of speakers attached to your head.

    I heard a few programmers debating this recently. One of them mentioned that he often uses music, a soothing melody that helps to block out distractions. Another said that white noise is a help. A few others actually mentioned that a private office and silence was more important for them. I know that in the past I’ve often tried to pick more mellow tunes, often jazz or classical music without a vocal component, when I needed to concentrate.

    Another person mentioned that there has been work that shows music is distracting to people, and it can perhaps occupy a portion of your brain and make you less efficient. You might notice less patterns, or consider things differently with music playing. I found that plausible, and decided to ask the question this Friday.

    Would you prefer silence, music, or some other background noise when you are working?

    I often go to a Starbucks or a bookstore and write on my laptop, just to have the white noise of people in the background. I think I get some level of energy from having other people around, but not interacting with me. I might listen to some music, but often I just sit there and focus on my work.

    When I used to work in a corporate environment, I found that I used music, but it was really to block out the distractions of other people nearby. Being in my own world often helped me get into the zone, and having large blocks of time were essential.

    So let us know what works for you, why, and if you’ve tried anything else. If you have good arguments to present to management for achieving your ideal work environment, let us know as well.

    Steve Jones

  • Salary Averages

    I saw this posted on Twitter, yet another reason to have a variety of people you follow. Some very interesting links and ideas get shared there.

    It’s a set of IT salary charts and values from a recent survey on Datamation. The salaries look about where I expected, though the ones for database administrator managers were higher than I thought. Here’s the chart:

    database-administration-manager

    It has a median at $110, which is a nice number. It’s higher than the data warehouse specialist at $92k.

    Note these are national averages, but they ought to remind you that IT is a good industry to work in and we are very well paid.