It obviously takes a Joel Kallman Day to get me writing a blog post! And it does make sense since Joel was a true community supporter. He always made me feel I am doing valuable work when sharing my knowledge. And that I should always try to contribute more to the community.

Next week is the Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas. The first time for a long time the community gets together, invited by Oracle. Joel would appreciate this. It still hurts to realize he will not be there.

I am excited to meet so many friends after all these years, and so looking forward making new friends. The community is extremely important and makes the techie life even better: computers are fun but even more fun when you can share the feeling with other people. Another important part of the event is hearing what’s coming next on the Oracle space and what people have done using the Oracle technology, the techie part itself.

Of course, I will do my part of sharing the knowledge too. I will be talking about one of my favorite topics: machine learning. Machine Learning in the Cloud – Without Any Panic. I want to talk about this topic because I have realized many people are curious and interested in machine learning but worried about the complexity of it. What if I cannot understand machine learning? What if it is too difficult for me? In my session I will explain the features Oracle has created in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to make using machine learning as easy as possible. And it is easy. There is no reason to panic and worry, you will be fine with machine learning. And to remind: the community is there to help you, if any problems. You can always ask for advice or guidance if you think you do not know what to do next.

I will also attend an Oracle ACE Program Roundtable with Jennifer Nicholson (Director, ACE Program Management, Oracle) to discuss how an individual can contribute to the community. We will discuss about the Oracle ACE Program, Oracle’s premier community program that recognizes & rewards individuals for their contributions to the Oracle community. Oracle ACEs love sharing their knowledge and helping the Oracle community, and therefore the ACE Program is an important part of the community. There are many ways you can contribute: you can write blog posts or books, speak, mentor…Whatever feels comfortable to you. And guess what, you do not only feel good when helping others, you will also learn a lot! And you will make amazing friends!

I hope to see many of you at the CloudWorld, or any of the other amazing Oracle Community events during this year or the years to come. Being a techie is fun, but being a techie with a supporting community is so much more fun!

I guess if this is not worth blogging nothing is… My blog is on TOP 60 Oracle Blogs!!!

http://blog.feedspot.com/oracle_blogs/

Hooray!

Thank you for reading this blog and keeping the blog on this list!

I am so sorry I have been too busy to blog lately but I promise I will fix that.

Thank you for your support and please keep reading my blog!

Cheers,

Heli

If you follow me on twitter or see me in day-to-day life you know I had “some” problems with my iPhone5. But I did not want to upgrade to iPhone6, I rather waited for iPhone7. Just to give you an idea briefly: the battery needed to be recharged 4-5 times per day (42% meant that no point trying to use Sports Tracker or see your emails too often, the phone will die in less than an hour), the phone gets hot every now and then, the Wi-Fi was not working well and those problems forced me to reboot the phone at least 2-3 times a day and so on. I am sure you already understand how frustrated I was…

A bit more than a month ago one evening my iPhone stopped working, totally. I was just about to go to the gym but… I need my phone in my work so an option not having a phone tomorrow was not an option and going to gym without being able to use Sports Tracker…no… So I really had no other option but to try to recover the phone…

I was really lucky: I had a backup from that morning. The backup was in our office and I was at home so the first thing was to drive to the office and find the backup. Then the recovery started. It was reaaaally slow. By the estimation of iTunes I knew it will take hours… I decided to go for a run while it is recovering. I was wearing my iWatch for the run. It took me 7 hours to complete the recovery (not the run 😀 ). It was early in the morning when I finally had my iPhone working again (thank you, thank you, I was so happy about it) and then the phone decided to reset my watch and update the data. What I learned during this exercise was that the phone is the master and the watch is the slave. What does that mean? My running was gone! Like I never run. The watch never had a chance to tell the phone about my run before the phone erased my watch.

But never mind, everything else was recovered and I had my phone and watch working again. I was really tired in the office, but happy 🙂

I was in San Francisco when the new iPhone came out but immediately heard they run out from the stock. I did not want to wait anymore so I told my elder son to order me one to home. It took several weeks (4?) to arrive and of course it arrived while I was travelling in Poland. When I returned home I was too busy to start setting up the new phone, especially since I already learned it is not a job I can do in a minute… Last evening (during a meeting) I decided it is the time to start using the new phone…

Just a note: I had three top level IT experts in the room (one dba and two developers) plus my elder son who is very smart with technology so please do not even think for a second “there you see when a woman is trying to be technical”…

First I plugged the phone to my computer (which had the backup of my previous phone). The iTunes told me the iTunes version I have is too old for my new phone and must be updated. Ok, let’s update. After a while it tells me the signature for iTunes is faulty and therefore it cannot be updated. What next? Google. The advice I found was simply install the new version, do not update. Ok, I did that. Now the iTunes is saying “cannot connect to Heli’s iPhone5”. What? Why do you want to connect to iPhone5? The sim is already on the new one and the new phone is connected to iTunes, the backup should be in this computer. Think! OK, got it, the screen of the iPhone7 is locked (insert the pin) and iTunes calls it Heli’s iPhone5 because of the backup. Here we go, backup restored in not too long. But what about my iWatch? It looks happy and working but no messages showing up on the screen. Yeah right you need to pair it with the new phone. But how to do it?

We all try but we have no idea how to do it. Google. Then I understand I must reset the watch (that is scary, it tells me that all the data will be gone but I already learned it last time that the data on my watch is useless and the phone always wins so ok) and do the pairing. Next thing (surprise) is that the phone tells me the software on my watch is too old and must be updated. Ok, do it. I wait, I wait, I wait… I finally go to bed.

Now it’s the next morning and it is still not ready. I started the pairing again…

This morning I was luckier than Mark Rittman (https://medium.com/mark-rittman/the-story-behind-the-ikettle-the-eleven-hour-struggle-to-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-why-it-was-all-769144d12d7#.vme8k1ybp): I was able to have my coffee, oatmeal and rye-bread while waiting for my “iThings” to start working. I was able to read my emails and follow social media with my laptop. So I really cannot complain, except that I do not have an extra 2h in a morning for this. I remember the times when the phones just worked and starting to use a new phone was easy. I miss those days! I solve technical problems as part of my work but I DO NOT WANT to solve problems with my phone or my watch. I simply want them to work…

Now, 2h later, my phone says it is not able to find updates for the watch and asks me to start over… Great! Have a wonderful day! I might continue in the evening or I might stop using my iWatch…let’s see…

Cheers,

Heli

P.S. I do not give up easily…trying one more time. The error message was not an error message but saying all is good now and you can start pairing your phone and watch. At least I hope so… Dear Apple, please work on your wording, you make our life very hard now. Missleading error messages are a pain! I left home too late because of this mess but with both the phone and the watch, and both working.

If you want to read what I wrote years ago here’s the link for my previous blog: http://helifromfinland.blogspot.fi/.

I do not update it anymore but for me it was fun to read after such a long time 🙂

Cheers,

Heli

I have been mentoring younger people on IT (or who ever has wanted me to mentor him/her 🙂 ) occasionally and unofficially for many years and I have been teaching anybody who is interested 🙂 But now I do have an official Mentor status!

My University (Helsinki University) has just nominated the first two mentors in the whole history of the department of Computer Science and guess what…I am one of them! This is a real honor! I am a bit surprised how excited I am about it. I will meet my students in less than two weeks and then it all starts…

Life is good,

Heli