To everything (turn, turn, turn) there are two seasons (turn, turn, turn)

Ecclesiastes 1:9 (New International Version)

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

When someone has been blogging since October 2003, there is obviously a potential to perform a personal type of data mining - going back into old posts, revisiting topics that were of great interest to me a couple of years ago, and the like.

This is something that I've thought about doing for some time, and in fact it's probably something that I should make a New Year's resolution about. However, if I make a New Year's resolution to leap into the archives during 2009, that will probably ensure that I won't do it, since New Year's resolutions are meant to be broken.

But I guess I'm already doing it, after a fashion. It took a Jake Kuramoto post to bring this fact home to me.

If you don't know who Jake Kuramoto is, he is an Oracle employee and the chief blogger for the Oracle AppsLab, a group within Oracle that conceives and implements various endeavors to benefit Oracle and the Oracle community.

For example, in the course of writing his year end post about the AppsLab blog, Jake touched upon one of the AppsLab's successes:

Mix left the nest.

We spent much of the first part of 2008 building new features for Mix with the help of ENTP.

No, Jake is not referring to a Myers-Briggs thingie. In this context, ENTP is actually a consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. But let's get back to what the AppsLab and ENTP did:

Marketing saw potential in Mix and made it a centerpiece of their OpenWorld 2008 efforts, including the highly popular Suggest a Session campaign.

Mix has since graduated out of the ‘Lab and into the capable hands of Marketing. This is perfect for everyone involved. One of our original goals as a lab was to keep the innovation flowing, both in and out of the team. So, when Mix was ready for primetime, it naturally went to an organization that could support its user base appropriately.

Now while I happen to be an Mix member (would that make me a Mixer?), and while I've written about Mix in the past (for example, see my post Debra Lilley gets a lift from the Oracle Mix community), that isn't why Jake mentioned me in his year-end post. This is what he said:

The 8 things meme circled the ‘tubes all year.

The controversial round of blog tagging I lobbed into the Oracle blogosphere back in January just resurfaced again, like a bad penny. Initially, I planned to track its progress, but after the blowback, I figured it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. Still, the experiment worked as planned, exposing several parts of the blogsphere, and forcing the Ontario Emperor to divulge 14 things about himself.

For those who are counting, Jake got fourteen by adding the six things I just posted with the eight things I wrote at the beginning of the year. In summary, the fourteen items are:

1. I shook Gerald Ford's hand in 1977.


2. Via Reed College's participation in Usenet, I am an Internet pioneer.


3. I used to post mp3 files.


4. David Allen of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin referred to me in a 1998 column.


5. I called Jim "Poorman" Trenton's "anti-radio" show at about the same time.


6. Via Reed College's...hey, wait, this is the same as item 2. Oops.


7. I contributed to the "Word Search" Bible study blog (R.I.P.).


8. I have acted in several stage productions.


9. I like to live wherever I am.


10. Our Christmas tree went up late in 2008.


11. My division is being sold...sometime.


12. I attended a different church on December 21, 2008.


13. I haven't been to Canada in a while.


14. My disk is full.

Well, since I really only posted thirteen things about myself (since two of the original eight items were pretty much the same thing), I guess I'd better come up with one other random item.

Here's a good one - I've mentioned that I didn't avail myself of the chance to see Depeche Mode (and OMD) at the Rose Bowl, but I also missed a chance to see Jonathan Richman, even though I could have seen him for free by taking a thirty-second walk. This is again a Reed College story, but it's outside of the classroom or the lab. Every year Reed closes its spring semester with a Renaissance Fayre which has hardly anything to do with the Renaissance, but it does emphasize the "Fayre" part. One year Jonathan Richman was scheduled to play at the event. This was years after his ground-breaking work, and occurred at about the time he was singing about being a little airplane, but it was certainly a show worth seeing. Unfortunately, there was a Ferris wheel at this Ren Fayre, and after going around the wheel one time...the operator decided to send us around a second time. After that experience I wasn't up to doing anything, so I missed my chance to see Richman.

But, by the way, I already wrote about Reed's Renaissance Fayre in response to a Pownce item.

The Pownce item was written by Jake Kuramoto.

Yeah, this is one of those subtle connections between things.

P.S. for people checking out my post title. The verse cited by the Byrds, and Pete Seeger, is actually found in Ecclesiastes 3. But if you're allowed to use Wikipedia, you already know that.

P.P.S. For those who say that my two meme posts were written in one season, not two...you're right. But they were two SEPARATE winters, weren't they?

Sphere: Related Content