There’s a mass orgy taking place in our pond this weekend. The frogs are hard at it again - it must be springtime! The first spawn I found was actually in the filtration housing, one batch of spawn plus 38 frogs - 36 coupling and two single males looking for action. I hefted all the above into the main pond itself, and left them to get on with it. Yesterday afternoon, the spawning had begun in earnest.

What more can I say? I was leaving home, for work, this morning at 06:55 and when I opened the garage door (from the inside) a frog was sitting there, right slap bang in the middle of the doorway. She, for it was a girl frog, just sat looking at me. Obviously, if I was to drive over her, she wouldn’t be too happy (neither would I, I like frogs) so I picked her up to take her to the pond.

On Sunday (14th March) I went to check on the bees. Hefting the hive was a tad tricky as they were all out and about flying around and generally being bees. The weather had taken a bit of a warm turn (relative to recent months that is) and they took advantage. A closer inspection showed a good few had been “hopping” over the hedge to a crocus ‘plantation’ not 10 feet from the hive and were covered in shocking yellow pollen.

£6.5 million per year it would appear. A new Parliamentary Standards Authority has been set up to monitor our beloved politicians and to keep them honest. According to Radio 4 today, this has an annual budget of £6.5 million and will employ 80 people. Is it just me, or is it a tad strange that the people we elect to run (ruin?) the country should need so much watching to keep them honest?

Subject to unannounced changes of course, but … All supplied scripts will be QA’d to ensure adherence to the following standards. Any script that fails on one or more of the following rules will not be applied to any system. Instead it will be returned to the vendor for correction. All vendor or internally supplied scripts must be able to be run - without error - in SQL*Plus. We need this as a standard because of all the wonderful GUI tools out there in vendor land, Toad etc are fine - if you can guarantee that the person running the script has the same tool.

I hefted the hive the other evening - checking for the remaining supplies - it’s still heavy, so the girls should be fine for a while yet. Unfortunately, when I peeked in through the mouse guard, there was a pile of dead bees. Not good. There are still lots of live ones, clustering on the combs to stay warm (and alive!) so that’s good. It’s just a shame that winter kills off so many of them.

Well, the snows are here and the temperatures have dropped dramatically. The bees are settled in for winter. Hopefully they will make it through to next year (only eight days away!) and be ready to start hunting and gathering pollen, nectar and all the other stuff that they seem to like so much. We only had them for a brief period at the end of 2009, we got them in late August/Early September but so far they seem to have been fine.

Check out this link first. Speaking as a ginger myself, I have no idea what that woman is complaining about. So what if a card says something funny about gingers (ok, funny is relative, some things I find funny others don’t and vice versa) - it’s called humour and it doesn’t hurt! I wonder if this woman was simply ‘offended’ because she was after a payout form Tesco for “mental distress” or some other such nonsense.

Well, it has happened - granted, a few weeks ago - but we have bees. Peter, our mentor was as good as his word and he supplied us with a hive of bees. They were moved by us from a location outside Leeds, West Yorkshire, to our own location. I got stung twice - once on the arm and once on the end of my nose! That certainly makes your eyes water, I can tell you!

Tomorrow night (Tuesday 18th August 2009), Alison and I are off out to a secret location near where we live to colect our very first honey bee swarm. Our Mentor, Peter, has been looking after then for us while we were on holiday, and tomorrow we get to take them home. We’ve been on the Harrogate & Ripon Beekeepers Association course and are, unfortunately, the last people to get some bees.

From time to time an Oracle based application will encounter a deadlock. This happens when two (or more) sessions are holding onto a resource and waiting for another one before it can relinquish the one(s) it holds. There is quite a lot of misunderstanding about deadlocks and what happens within Oracle to relieve the situation. Hopefully this blog entry will help to sort it all out. First of all, a brief demonstration.

I’m not a religious person - I think and check the evidence rather than accepting the word of a misogynistic bloke in a frock. However when confronted by a religious zealot I find the following conversation goes down rather well! But then, I’m a right b’stard! Me: Do you believe in Santa Claus? Religious Person: No, don’t be stupid. Me: But you believe in god? RP: Yes, of course. So what’s the difference?

All organisations need Change Control to make sure that changes are applied correctly and so on. However, have Change Control departments become the new “Health & Safety” and gone beyond being useful to being a disruptive and obstructive unit interested only in getting in the way rather than getting work done? I’m all in favour of change control - it serves a purpose and helps prevent invalid changes being applied to production (or test) systems without them having been checked, tested and applied correctly with full cooperation from the system’s users.