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I was contacted a few months ago by some motivated individuals who were members of the Oracle RAC SIG. They wanted to start a new local Oracle user group in their region of Northern India and were looking for advice. I offered a few pointers and recently, they launched the new group – North India Oracle Users Group at nioug.org.

If you are in Northern India or have colleagues or friends that are located there, you should check out this group. If you would like to get involved by coordinating a meeting, being a speaker, or helping in any way, I’d encourage you to contact one of the individuals listed on the Board of Directors to see how you can help as a volunteer. They’re allowing registration for free (at least for now) too.

They’ve also established a blog to publish upcoming news on events and happenings with the group. It has an RSS feed, so you may want to subscribe to easily track the new posts there.

Good luck to all the volunteers and the new group!

It’s official, I’m a Mac user now. I say user and not “Mac guy” because I was never a “Windows guy” either. If you need to label me, I guess I’m a “Linux guy”. Anyway, my first week with the Mac as my full-time machine has been pretty easy overall. I still don’t know Mac OS X as well as I know about WinXP, but I’m overall less annoyed with the Mac (even with the unknowns) on a daily basis.

So far, I’ve been able to port over the things I use frequently like twhirl, IM (Adium), Firefox, VMWare, Thunderbird, and, since my company and customers are heavily vested in .doc, .ppt, and .xls, MS Office with Outlook-replacement Entourage. Of course, where would I be without iTunes?

I read an interesting article today that I thought summed up a lot of peoples’ apprehension or resistance to switching. The bottom line is that most people fear what they don’t know or understand and it’s just easier to avoid change since that would require work to re-learn many tasks. Continue reading “RIP My Windows Laptop”