Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

I got tagged in the Oracle Blogsphere tag game by Chris Muir so here goes my entry of 8 things you didn't know about me.

1. I play guitar, mostly just for fun, but a couple of times I actually joined bands. The problem is that because I also own a bass guitar, I'm always ending up as the bass player (too many guitarists out there I guess) - One time I ended up in a band that performed at OOW SF. It was called "The Exception" and did gigs in two consecutive years at OOW. I wrote the lyrics for half of the songs - which is probably something I should be proud of.
There is a fan based web site for the band where you can hear a sample from two songs: http://geocities.com/the_exceptions_band/



2 .I used to be a magician and even got paid for it a couple of times. I picked it up in my teenage days and I can still do a trick now and then.

You can see a sample here.

3. I juggle. Not as much as I used too, but I can do a mean three ball set and hold 5 balls up in the air for several seconds.



4. I relocated to the US from Israel after an 8 year gig at Oracle Israel - which means that I'll be getting a nice bonus of $250 this year - Oracle's gift for the 15th year at Oracle anniversary.



5. My first "job" as a developer was with the Israeli army on a project that used Oracle Forms 2.0 and Oracle 5.0 as a DB - I remember the complex upgrade to Forms 2.3 with the exec macro, and the revolution of PL/SQL that came with Oracle 6.0. (maybe I should stop outdating myself now).



6. At one point in my military service I shared a room with another guy called Shai - who was doing a project on a Mac connecting to an Oracle DB at that time. Later this guy went on to become number 2 at SAP - his name is Shai Aggasi.



7. And if you were wondering about the name spelling of "Shay/Shai" in the last paragraph - the correct way to write it is in heberw, and the correct way to pronounce it is as if it was written as Shy.



8. I'm a mac convert because of the Oracle Developer Days.

I used to use a PC (and still am at work), but at one point Apple sponsored a round of the Oracle Developer Days, and we got macbook's that we could demo JDev on. I picked one for the weekend before the event I was suppose to go to, and ended up editing a DVD movie of my kids on it that weekend - and I was hooked.

I got an iMac, and recently another one, and I never looked back...



So there you go - 8 things that you probably didn't know about me, and that you probably don't care about.

Now it's time to make others join the game so -
Steve Muench
,Duncan Mills
,Juan Ruiz
,John Stegeman
,Eric Marcoux
,Gerard Davison
,Susan Duncan
,The Oracles
it's now your turn to join.