I was able to catch a little bit of the last total lunar eclipse till 2007 tonight. The moon had a weird red haze to it. CNN had a good article about the eclipse.

Hope you all were able to see it.

In other news, the Boston Red Sox have broken the 80yr. curse and won the 2004 World Series. They deserved it!

I decided I would keep writing about this subject as it has somewhat sparked some people’s interests.

For some reason there was a discussion yesterday that involved the question, “Do we know the true nature of people?”. I had to think about it a while but ended up deciding that right when you think you know someone, they change. Maybe for better, maybe for worse. People are changing all of the time, that is what keeps us interesting. But it also makes others confused and angry at times.

You think you know someone extremely well, then they turn and do something that is completely unexpected. Does that mean that you like them less? It could. But if the person changes for the better it could also push you away. Maybe you become jealous or untrusting because they are not the same person you used to know.

I think the thing that makes me the most frustrated is that people as a whole use excuses to cover up their own mistakes/wrong doing or their own conscience. We all do it. Why? Because excuses are easier than facing the facts. No one wants to be told that they are a slow worker or that they do understand something, so they make up an excuse.

How do we get around excuses? More on that next time….

My database professor decided to try and throw a weird/hard problem at me but after some playing with Oracle I was able to figure it out.

Basically, I have a table of customers, each customer has a name and an annual revenue. What my professor wanted was to select the customers who’s annual revenue was higher than the average of all of the annual revenues of all customers less themselves. Sounds somewhat difficult. Not really.

SELECT cust_name, cust_annual_rev

FROM customer c

WHERE cust_annual_rev >

   (SELECT AVG(cust_annual_rev)

    FROM customer

    WHERE cust_id <> c.cust_id);

Wasn’t too difficult… Maybe I’ll get some extra credit or something.