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December 2, 2020 - February 20, 2023
The good news is that suddenly you have all these choices; the bad news is that suddenly you have all these choices.
straddle
quartered
prying
hulls
whaler.
careen
hurled
we actually overhaul and beat USA 49.
starboard
tack.
downwind,
spar
trimmers,
rudder.
Whitbreads (the around-the-world yacht race)
prosaic:
rekindled
I’d mentioned to Ellison a few days earlier a theory I had that people who had very intense work lives often found relaxing difficult and that the best they could do was to find some alternative stress that so fully engaged their attention that it drove everything else out of their mind. Ellison said, “That’s certainly true for me. I’d never heard the expression ‘alternative stress’ until you said it, but it immediately struck me as a perfect explanation for all my hobbies. Sailing and flying are definitely alternative stress activities.
Naturally, he doesn’t agree. “Winning is a habit. So is losing. Competing and winning at sailing has made me more confident, intense, and determined to win at Oracle. Winning breeds winning. The more you win, the more you want to win. The more you win, the more you think you can win.
[Butterworth]
steepness
smart-alecky
fight-or-flight
equestrian
I wasn’t able to do any of that until I became reasonably successful at the two things Freud says are important in life: love and work.
nihilism.
In reality, cats and dogs have similar intelligence levels but different survival strategies. The dog is dependent and must please to get regular meals. The cat will mooch off his human roommates, but if the food runs out the cat can survive on its own. I love golden retrievers, but I don’t want to be one. I’d much rather be a cat.
vamp.
If I was dating, I’d miss the love and comfort of a family. I was always afraid I was missing something.”
subsumed.
narcissistic.
“The happier you are with your separate and independent life, the better your relationship is likely to be. Our relationship is best when her writing is going well and things are good at Oracle.”
In other words, to be capable of accepting the love of others, you first have to love yourself.
There’s this primal connection to the sound of the water, the moisture in the air, the rich smell of pine needles, and the damp soil.
He says, “People who set incredibly high standards for their work find it difficult to collaborate with people who don’t understand and appreciate their reckless pursuit of perfection. But I love working with these brilliant people with their compulsive personalities. I find them interesting, and I think I understand what drives them. I was very lucky to find Jon. Without him I never would have gone ahead with the project.”
philistines
In Paul Discoe and Jon Bannenberg, Ellison had found uncompromising, driven perfectionists who shared his appetite to create something extraordinary.
helter-skelter
brash
prurient
“Life is the only miracle,” he often says. With sixty fast approaching, he thinks increasingly about how to extract the most from what is left to him: “I don’t waste a lot of time. I work intensely on things I care about, and I spend my time with people that I care about. I do what I want to with my time, because I know there’s not much of it left.”
“As long as you’re learning, as long as you’re solving problems, as long as you are working with your mind, then you’re alive. Problems intrigue, excite, and energize me.”
When capitalism is tempered by democracy there is the hope of combining prosperity with humanity.
needle-in-the-haystack
booby-trapped
In other words, if your process automation system is incomplete—and most are—then your applications database will be incomplete as a consequence. And an incomplete database makes building a business intelligence system virtually impossible.”
“Analysts don’t try to foretell the future; they try to explain the recent past. If you have a series of bad quarters, they explain that it must be because you have product problems. If you then have a series of good quarters, they explain that it’s because you’ve overcome your product problems. They’ll conclude that our E-Business Suite product problems are over when we start growing faster than our applications competitors. It’s that simple—they just look at the numbers.”
As we started to put in Daily Business Intelligence, I realized that Oracle had the wrong product-quality metrics; we had been measuring the wrong things for years. Oracle had held engineering accountable for product defects—bugs—rather than service requests. A product can be bug-free and still generate too many service requests because it’s difficult to install or difficult to use. We decided that our primary measure of product quality would be the number of service requests, not the number of defects or bugs. Once we got the metrics right, the squabbling between support and development
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