Meeting

Seeing as I did a blog post about looking forward to my second Norwegian Oracle User Group spring meeting, I suppose I should say how it went.

Later this month, on April 17-20th, I am presenting again at the Norwegian Oracle user group (OUGN) spring conference {modern browsers will allow you to translate any Norwegian if you need to} . I loved it last year, as you can see from my third-day post on it. I’ve been lucky to attend some very good conferences over the last few years but those three days at the OUGN conference last year were, I think, my favourite single event to date. If you are within striking distance of Oslo and can negotiate the time out of the office, I would strongly recommend the event. If you can’t negotiate the time, heck, take a holiday and go anyway

Well, I’ve just finished pushing the last few bits into my suitcase for my trip to the US for the Rocky Mountain User Group Training Days 2013.

It is a few years since I went to the US for pleasure (3 years?) and much longer since I went there on a combined work/pleasure trip – as I HATE going through US immigration.

This has been a good but tiring week. It started with the UKOUG TEBS conference where I saw lots of people I know, a few who I didn’t but now do and I had good times in pubs and restaurants. One evening culminated in my singing part of “Two out of Three ain’t bad” in the style of a munchkin with Nial Litchfield in a pub at 1am, which I am sure he woud rather forget about – so if you know him, ask him about it. For me that was the indicator to go lie down in the dark and sleep. Irrespectve of drunken singing, I must had talked about 20 topics with 40 people over the conference, exchanging ideas, tricks and war stories.

Just a quick Friday Philosophy {the day job is very demanding at the moment, thus the silence on the Blog front}

I’m presenting in Leeds at the start of July on UKOUG AIM SIG on “The First Few Things You Need To Know About Exadata”. As part of the final preparation of the agenda it’s been raised that we should have a beer after the event and put it on the agenda.

Now, when I ran the Management and Infrastructure SIG, there was always a last item of “retire to a pub for a drink or two”. It is a common feature of technical UKOUG SIGs and a great opportunity to chat to the speakers more.

The last day of the three (and second on the ferry and of the conference proper) had a lot of talks I wanted to see, especially Dan Morgan talking about “Insanely large Databases”. It was a good talk, with an interesting interlude when a very loud announcement let us know we had docked at Kiel. Dan handled it with aplomb. Dan was talking about one specific experience he had suffered recently and he covered quite a few things I did and some I planned to but never got that far – but he had more technical details about the issues he had encountered, so all in all probably of more immediate use to the audience than my talk. It was a very good session. I have to confess, there were times I laughed out loud as memories flooded in, prompted by his wise words – I fear others may have interpreted differently but, honestly, I was laughing tears of shared pain.

As I said yesterday, I am not one for blogging about conferences. So what the heck, I’ll do another post on this one .

You might have picked up on the fact that I am not very good on the sea and have a lot of nervousness about this idea of spending 2 days on an ocean-going liner. So today is the day we move over to being on the water, the OUGN conference proper. I’m delighted to say I am not the only one nervous about this boat lark, Marie Colgan {or, as I should be calling her, “The Optimizer Lady” – since Doug Burns christened her back at the UKOUG 2011 conference} feels the same. There is nothing better to reduce one’s apprehension about something than finding someone else who is just as if not more anxious about it. I suspect this is an evil way to think but I can’t help it.

I’m not really one for blogging about conferences – I mean who cares what someone else saw being presented? But this is the first time I have stopped moving long enough (and been in contact with the internet world) to blog and my brain is too fried to do a technical one.

I’m just doing some last minute preparation for the Norwegian User Group Spring Seminar. This is quite a large conference with 5 concurrent streams and a very good line-up of presenters. You can see the agenda here.

What is also a little unusual about this conference is that it is mostly on a boat, or rather a ship. When I was first asked if I would put forward a talk or two I declined – as I am very prone to being sea-sick. Truls Bergersen, who helps organize the event, got in touch with me a few weeks later and said “we are doing a day on land first, do you want to present then?”. Sure! That would be great! So I am, I’ll be doing my talk on Index Organized Tables once more {and then I think I’ll put it to bed for a couple of years}.

Who’s up for a beer or whiskey in Edinburgh on the evening of 28th Feb?

I’ve been promising myself I’d do the Scottish SIG for three or four years but life has always conspired to stop me. However, at last I am going to manage it this year.

The meeting is on the 29th February at the Oracle {was Sun} office in Linlithgow. You can see the schedule and details here. As ever, it is being chaired by Thomas Presslie, though I {and I suspect Mr Hasler} will be hoping he is not forcing drams of Whiskey on people before 10am in the morning, as he did at the last UKOUG conference…