Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

Spot the Oracle Faces April 15, 2016

My wife has been going through old photo’s from her mother today, trying to find a picture of Uncle Stan. In the box of photographs was also a magazine – an Oracle magazine!

Oracle Magazine award winners 2003!

As you can see from the front cover, it is the Oracle Magazine from the end of 2003, with the Oracle Magazine 2003 Award Winners on it. The tiny photograph on the bottom right is me :-). Sue’s mum, Di, seemed to be more interested in what I did at work than my own mum (but then Di was like that).

So how many of the people on the magazine do you recognize? If you’ve met them, you should be able to identify a few – even though we are all at least 13 years older than those pictures. If you click on the image, you will get a larger version which might help. It is SO long ago that I don’t think there is an electronic issue of the magazine online, not even in the Oracle Magazine archive. But then, who wants to know about enterprise grid computing in 10g now? I could not even find another copy of the front cover in my 90-second search.

I’m not really one for looking to the past but I do enjoy the odd reminisce. It’s good to see what happened in the past (be it good or bad) and where it has left you in the present. There seems to have been quite a bit of this going on around me this week. Some people on the OakTable have been sharing pictures with the group of a similar vintage (so way before my time), I was talking about how we got into presenting and the Oracle community with Brendan Tierney over the last couple of days and at home we have been looking back even further. The “Uncle Stan” I mentioned was a POW in WW2 in Singapore and he painted the Changi Murals when he was there – painted to help keep up the spirits of those in the infirmary at the time. We will visit The Changi Museum to see the replicas and read the history when we are out there in 2 weeks and, if we are lucky, we might even get to see the originals.

Getting the 2003 Oracle magazine “Beta tester of the year” award was my first real step into the Oracle community. I’d only just started presenting (I think once at UKOUG Tech conference & one SIG, a couple of Oracle Life Science conferences plus being the “friendly face of the end user” at an Open World in 2002 talk…maybe 2003. I never even got on the agenda for that one). I got the award more as the representative of the work done by people in my team, ie their work, as opposed to mine – and for a long while I felt a bit guilty about it. But as a good friend pointed out, it was a team that I had built, doing work I guided and, between myself and Shanthi Sivadasan, we had it all running well and we were doing stuff that no one else would own up to doing (and that HP offered to help us with – and we ended up helping them!).

So back to the magazine cover. Who can you spot? Some I am pretty sure are no longer anything to do with the Oracle scene, but some still are…:

Arup Nanda, DBA of the year (oTY)
Tim Sharick, CTO oTY
Ronan Miles, IT Manager oTY
Peter Charles Smith, PL/SQL developer oTY
TonyJambu, consultant oTY
Bob Magan, developer oTY
Jeroen Baltussen, web services developer oTY
Harvinder Singh Saluja, Jdeveloper oTY
Arno Van Der Klok Java developer oTY
Matt Rhoades, BI developer oTY
Arnaud Bontemps, Portal developer oTY
Tom Copeland, Open Source developer oTY
{how many “X develop of the years”? How many “DBA-types” of the year? Oh yes, 10g was supposed to be the death of the DBA – again}
Jamie Kinney & Grant McAlister, Linux Innovators oTY
Hoosh Asfar, Early Adopter oTY
Mogens Norgaard {who?}, Educator oTY
Tom Kyte {another obscure one}, Oracle Book Author oTY
Jason Hunter, Oracle Magazine Author oTY
Me, Beta Tester oTY
Andrew Clarke, OTN contributor oTY
Rick Hamilton, Architect oTY