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By me: Oracle & Microsoft’s big cloud partnership: It’s about AI: For the first time, Oracle is bringing its Autonomous Database to another company’s cloud, running on Oracle Exadata servers in Microsoft Azure data centers.

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I have discovered Excalidraw and achieved nerdvana.

I, a complete design illiterate, was able to create a simple networking diagram for a marketing document in 25 minutes, having never used the tool before. Later, the client will be able to use Excalidraw’s built-in collaboration tools to make changes, and then hand off to a designer to polish.

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Earlier I mentioned the movie “The Postman Always Rings Twice” but I brain-farted and called it “The Milkman Always Rings Twice” and now I want to see “The Milkman Always Rings Twice,” which would be about a milkman who’s seduced by a femme fatale who is lactose intolerant.

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My latest article: Oracle boosts multi-cloud support for AWS and Red Hat OpenShift. It’s a big difference from previous years when Oracle tried—and spectacularly failed—to get customers to go all-in on Oracle’s cloud.

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A note to my fellow Jews, particularly Jewish-Americans

Do you feel any connection to the place where your grandparents came from? My grandparents came from Eastern Europe. Poland on my father’s side, and Lithuania on my mother’s. But I do not feel like a Polish-American or Lithuanian-American. I’m just plain American. Or a Jewish American. I suspect this is because my grandparents left those countries to get away from anti-Semitism, and found a welcoming home here. I have had the good fortune to be born in one of the few places and times in history where Jews face very little anti-Semitism.

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We have seen “Double Indemnity” and I have thoughts

I have avoided nearly all noir movies until now because I like stories to have good guys, and my preconception about noir is that these films entirely feature variations on bad people along with the occasional victim. I have seen “Double Indemnity” now and I see I was wrong. Not about the bad people—although there are one or two good people in this movie, they are not the main characters. However, “Double Indemnity” is not the least bit off-putting.

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A dog is a wondrous machine masterfully designed by billions of years of evolution to produce guilt.

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The chest freezer in our kitchen is like the warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie.

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A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials.

Read Max:

These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest an alternate dimension in which polite, good-natured, rigorously diverse groups of friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly how they are designed to be used, without complaint or error.

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Sandra Bullock and the Rise of Tech. Sandra Bullock movies reflect society’s changing attitude toward tech over her 30-year career.

Sometimes I think about how her super-hacker character in “The Net” orders pizza online, and how that was a big deal when the movie came out in 1995.

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A Rachel can be either a sandwich or a haircut. And yet I think this is rarely a source of confusion.

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Walking the dog, I saw a house with a five-foot “Christmas Story” leg lamp in the front window.

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Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are ‘coming to the end’ but together and ‘in love,’ their grandson shares

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Google.com was registered as a domain name today in 1997. (via)

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“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

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Enjoying a quiet evening at home shopping for nose hair trimmers.

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“For All Mankind” returns Nov. 10. Looks great! On the show, the year is 2003.

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I was thinking last night that my brain is still broken from the pandemic. It exaggerated my normal introversion and homebody tendencies into something resembling agoraphobia. I go weeks without going anywhere but the grocery store, picking up take-out once a week, my daily walk and that’s about it.

Yesterday I was looking through some photos I took on business trips and thought: That was me. I used to do that. I used to be that guy.

The situation is complicated by our being at higher risk than most people. But not going anywhere has its own risks.

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This one time I narrowly escaped being a clown for a children's party

Some years ago, a couple I was friends with pressured me to be a clown at the birthday party they were throwing for their little daughter. I firmly and repeatedly noped out on that, and they hired a professional clown, and later they said they were glad because the pro did a great job. They told me they asked the clown what was the weirdest event he ever performed at. The clown replied that it was an adult party.

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Historically, clowns go back thousands of years, and for that whole time, they were creepy, just as they are today. It’s only for a brief historical period in roughly the 1950s and 1960s that clowns were considered wholesome children’s entertainment.