UKOUG 2009 - Day 2

That's more like it!

Well yesterday was much better, although not very successful in terms of number of achievements or educational experiences, but I cheered up a hell of a lot. (Some might suggest that would be a good idea in general.)

I woke up fairly late because of the previous night's activities and just had time to whip myself into shape for my second presentation - the 'How I Learned to Love Pictures' one in Hall 1. Tom Kyte had the good grace to finish early so I had lots of setup time, mainly worrying about my decision to be brave and go with 11gR2 on my laptop - which can crawl at times. Cue a quick chat about Laptops and 32-bit O/S and Tom's Thinkpad recommendation. I'm certainly in new laptop territory now. It's served me well for 2 years, but enough's enough.

Then when Andrew Bulloch who is a Product Manager for a number of products including the OEM stuff I was going to demo walked in, said hello and wished me luck running 11gR2 on my laptop, I had a bad feeling!

However, I don't know about anybody else but I really enjoyed the presentation, think it went fairly well and it made up for Monday afternoon. As always, there are a few things I wish I'd shown but didn't (I can talk about these screens and the instrumentation for *ages*) but it all felt pretty good to me. Much better. I think Andrew would have rather I didn't introduce him to the audience - he was trying to hide in a corner - but as I'd referred to him a couple of times for answers to questions in my head I wasn't sure about, I felt it better to acknowledge his presence properly at the end rather than run the risk of 'talking to my mates' to the exclusion of the audience.

So much happier, I then met Tony Davis for lunch. He's someone I've been aware of for a while after he asked me to write an article for the Simple Talk website and other probably know of him (without perhaps realising it) as the editor of a number of classic Apress books. Just check out any you have and you'll likely see his name there. Very productive, good company and hopefully it'll lead to some more writing and perhaps some help with the development of their schema comparision tool. Going to take a look at it today if I get a chance.

Then a quick beer with Marco and Kurt - always difficult to keep up with all my mates and if you want a definition of friendship check this out. It was also Koert's opportunity to present Marco with that rare status symbol in the Oracle community - an ORA-600 T-shirt.



Treasure it, Marco! Then I simply had to have a sleep. I'm glad I did because I was much fresher, although later, for the start of the next evening's festivities which were sprawling and interesting as usual but the chat was great and a brilliant way to round off a cool day.



I like that photo. Don't know whether we both just looked ****ed, but I think it looks like a couple of good mates having a good time. Still mates after he forced me to create a Twitter account! Alex telling me how things are, as usual. (He's the only one allowed to do that.)

Of course it meant I slept in and I have now missed yet-another-presentation but am going to do my damndest to attend a few today. It's all very well concentrating on presentations and mates, but I don't feel I've learnt much yet this week

Then again, it is Mads' birthday tomorrow, so I'd better keep my priorities straight!