If you were in San Francisco last week for the Office 2.0 conference you might have noticed that Zoho had a party for their millionth user. I didn't make it to the conference, but I did notice the party writeup scroll by in my news aggregator the other day.

It turns out that their millionth person to sign up was none other than former PeopleTools developer Dean Detton. In addition to having been part of the PeopleTools team within PeopleSoft, Dean was also a member of the legendary Raving Daves, PeopleSoft's corporate band.

Dean gave up the joys of writing C++ code and cross-platform SQL awhile back and now owns a company called Prestige Home Automation up in Reno, NV. So if you're in the Reno/North Lake Tahoe area and looking for some help with home automation, give Dean a ring. He's a good guy.

Labels: 2008, History, Personal

Well, I was going to just ignore this whole Oracle blogs tagging thing, but Rich is a good guy and he tagged me. Besides, some other normally curmudgeonly folks have ponied up (of course some others have not), so what the heck.

1. I once tried to get Baer Tierkel to start a second PeopleSoft company band doing nothing but punk covers. The band was going to be called the "Sex PSTools".


2. Both of my kids were born in the same hospital as me.


3. I've crossed the equator around 45 times, been to 35 different countries, 49 states (Alaska still eludes me), and 6 continents.


4. I have given PeopleTools presentations completely in Spanish before (but I'm a bit rusty these days though)


5. I went to the same high school as Rick Bergquist (where's that blog Rick?) and Anthony Damaschino. Knowing Anthony is what actually got me into PeopleSoft to start with. Anthony had gotten our friend Doug Ostler (also, no blog, but makes up for it by being in the Hopyard "Hall of Foam") into PeopleSoft, who then helped get me into PeopleSoft. I helped the chain along by getting Willie Suh to join PeopleSoft. Willie is still there as a Director of development in PeopleTools.


6. As a direct result of item 4, I have actually done a SQL Alter on a PeopleTools system table in the middle of a presentation. A beta version of PeopleTools 7 had a weird bug where the related language table expected 3 columns when INSERTing new items, but 4 columns when doing UPDATEs. There wasn't enough time to swap the base language before the presentation, so the SQL Alter trick was needed.


7. I invited a new sport called "car hiking" in the Swiss Alps. My wife still gets nervous thinking about it.


8. I'm wearing "footie" pajamas right now. Seriously.

No time for lengthier explanations than that though. Gotta get back to my yak shaving.

Labels: 2008, Personal