ACED

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I’m only attending Monday of UKOUG Tech13. One of my colleagues quit, so there is no DBA at work today while I’m out on a jolly.

My session was at 09:00, which meant getting up at 05:00 to get the train to Manchester. While I was on the train I did a final run-through of my presentation and surfed the net on the train WiFi. I left the house in the dark. It was still dark by the time I got to Manchester. The winter is so depressing!

Just a quick note to say the top-level approval for OTNYathra 2014 – India OTN Tour has been granted. Next, we’ve got to submit our individual travel approvals and see how that goes. If everything goes to plan, I will be representing the Oracle ACE Program on this tour in February, which visits the following locations.

• Jallandar – 18th February
• Delhi - 20th February
• Mumbai - 22nd February
• Pune - 23rd February
• Hyderabad - 25th February
• Bangalore - 27th February
• Chennai – 1st March

Fingers crossed everything goes to plan.

Cheers

Tim…

Just a quick plug for an upcoming OTN tour, that I’m not on this year.

• Auckland, New Zealand : 8th November (agenda)
• Perth, Australia : 12th-13th November (agenda)
• Tokyo, Japan : 13th-15th November
• Beijing, China : 17th-18th November
• Guangzou, China : 19th November

I attended the OTN Asia Pacific Tour in 2011, which included some of these locations. Hopefully I will get to do it again in the near future.

Like any conferences, these events are all about the attendees, so the more people that turn up and the more vocal the attendees, the better the events are.

So the OTN Nordic Tour 2013 is over. Here are the posts I put out during the tour.

We got on the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo and met up with the OUGN folks for some food in the hotel. We spent a long time talking about non-Oracle stuff, like science and religion. It was fun.

The morning started with a long breakfast, which included me nearly throwing orange juice over Mike Dietrich and him succeeding in throwing tea over me. We both blamed the table, but in reality it was our secret desire for a food fight that caused it.

I spent the first two sessions of the DOUG event watching Mike Dietrich presenting on 12c upgrades, pluggable databases and new features. I’ve seen some of his stuff already during the LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg), but his presentations have changed a little since I last saw them. To quote Noons,

“Mike’s talk is superb. No bull, just down to facts…”

I think that sums it up nicely.

I didn’t sleep too well the night before the Stockholm event, so I woke up feeling extremely groggy. I think it was just the combination of excitement and adrenalin you get before starting a tour. I met Lonneke and Sten for breakfast, then headed on to the conference venue.

I watched Lonneke presenting on SOA for the first two sessions of the day. This is completely not my area of expertise, but I learnt a lot in these sessions. I now understand a lot of the buzzwords and a lot of the common pitfalls for the first time ever. I’ll never be a SOA guy, but it’s nice to know a little more, so that I can understand when people are leading me astray. You don’t have to know how to swim to recognise when someone is drowning.

I got up this morning in plenty of time to get to the airport to fly to Sweden to begin the OTN Nordic Tour 2013 tomorrow. I then proceeded to wait and wait and wait for the taxi. Eventually it did arrive, but now the rush hour traffic had started to build up, so time was ticking by and we were standing still for a very long time. I tweeted that I would probably miss my flight and I really believed I would.

After a considerable amount of time, with me trying to ignore the nervous glances of my driver, the traffic opened up, I got to the airport and check-in was empty, as was security. I got through in time to grab a drink on the way to boarding. Phew…

I’ll be representing the Oracle ACE Program as part of the OTN Nordic Tour this year. I’ve just booked my flights, so in a little over a week I’ll be starting the three date tour.

• Oct 22nd : Stockholm, Sweden (ORCAN) – 3 Presentations
• Oct 23rd : Copenhagen, Denmark (DOUG) – 2 Presentations
• Oct 24th : Oslo, Norway (OUGN) – 2 Presentations

I put forward a few different papers each event picked different ones, so it looks like I could be presenting up to 6 distinct sessions over the tour. This next week is going to be very busy. I’ve got to put the finishing touches to one presentation, then rehearse all 6 a few times…

Cheers

Tim…

I got up late, so I missed the morning gym session.

When I got to Moscone at about 08:30, I headed straight for the speakers room to play catch-up on emails, questions, blog posts and work emails. I expected that to take a few minutes, but it actually took me up to midday. It’s crazy how much time we spend on this community stuff.

I spent most of the afternoon in the OTN Lounge geeking out with a variety of people. I was initially expecting to spend the whole day in presentations, but it turned out I didn’t manage to get to a single one. I spent some time chatting with the ladies and gents from the RAC SIG about ideas for future directions for user groups and collaborative efforts like RAC Attack. It’s interesting to hear the different opinions and motivations of the people involved.