Entries tagged as oow
Oct 16: OOW 2009 - Swag Round-up
I've been trying for weeks to get a picture of me wearing the jacket you receive when you're made an ACE Director but it's proved trcky so I brought it over with me this week and wore it one day so Marco could take the photo. Unfortunately we didn't get round to it so here are a couple of photos without the male model.
As you can see, it's disgustingly sophisticated for this type of garment and has, on at least two occassions (Alex and I) passed the woman test. i.e. When our other halves have seen the garment they've both thought - 'hey, that one doesn't look too bad!'. However, I must admit that when I prepared to model it the other day, underneath it I wore the all time classic, best ever T-Shirt, to prove my heart is still in the right place
For those doubting it's status, you should have seen Marco Gralike practically begging me to swop it for one or more of his garments. No way, man! (although I might have a word with Kurt for you)
This year's annual ACE garment was another high-quality, reasonably sophisiticated affair and I can only assume hard lessons have been learned from the emergency flare red year ...
... and the ACEs also got this one, which I have ear-marked as a gift for Boneist when I get back to London.
The conference bag looked really nice too. Not the best quality, to be fair ....
It's a toss-up for the best T-Shirt of the conference, though, between the one I had the most fun with ....
... and the eventual winner - the OTN T-Shirt from the lounge. In fact, I tend to find the OTN shirt one of the best every year - always fits, always front and back designs, always black with a bit of red and white and always geeky. I actually wear these things occassionally during the year and Boneist would probably understand that I like this design with my semi-conductor obsession
... and all this without visiting the Exhibition Halls once. I really let the side down on that score this year.
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses.
As you can see, it's disgustingly sophisticated for this type of garment and has, on at least two occassions (Alex and I) passed the woman test. i.e. When our other halves have seen the garment they've both thought - 'hey, that one doesn't look too bad!'. However, I must admit that when I prepared to model it the other day, underneath it I wore the all time classic, best ever T-Shirt, to prove my heart is still in the right place
For those doubting it's status, you should have seen Marco Gralike practically begging me to swop it for one or more of his garments. No way, man! (although I might have a word with Kurt for you
)This year's annual ACE garment was another high-quality, reasonably sophisiticated affair and I can only assume hard lessons have been learned from the emergency flare red year ...
... and the ACEs also got this one, which I have ear-marked as a gift for Boneist when I get back to London.
The conference bag looked really nice too. Not the best quality, to be fair ....
It's a toss-up for the best T-Shirt of the conference, though, between the one I had the most fun with ....
... and the eventual winner - the OTN T-Shirt from the lounge. In fact, I tend to find the OTN shirt one of the best every year - always fits, always front and back designs, always black with a bit of red and white and always geeky. I actually wear these things occassionally during the year and Boneist would probably understand that I like this design with my semi-conductor obsession
... and all this without visiting the Exhibition Halls once. I really let the side down on that score this year.
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses.
Oct 16: OOW 2009 - A Step Up ...
... from my usual name-dropping, as Boneist pointed out so acutely
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Oracle ACE Director, President and Commander-in-Chief Obama!
How do I know that Barak Obama is an ACE Director? Because we're staying in the same hotel! Sorry, but I find the whole thing quite exciting for some bizarre reason.
It's a monumental pain in the neck, too, of course as Tim Hall, Chris Muir and I were unable to get back to our hotel last night because all of the surrounding street had been blocked off (that warning letter the hotel left in the room makes sense now). Which was a killer and I'm using as my excuse for drinking at least 3 drinks too many. How embarassing, I could barely keep my eyes open by the time I got back last night.
When I went outside for a cigarette this morning, the place was awash with armed and armoured Secret Service, Police everywhere, dogs, army reservists, etc, etc, etc and more hotel staff hanging around than usual, too, presumably hoping to meet him Ear-pieces *everywhere*. (Oh, and I should take this opportunity to say hello to a short, speccy, balding ear-piece-wearer back home in Edinburgh who I know is following these posts and suggest that he asks his missus to put a sock in it. I'm running very quickly in the other direction, though!)
I've just been down again and everything has quietened down now so he must have gone.
P.S. I didn't tell The Boys who are here. All of the Cuddly Toys are big Obama fans, to say the least, and a) they would have wanted to meet him and probably died of shock if they actually did; b) There would have been a riot when we got home and the other Cuddly Toys found out!!!
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. But next year, I'll be expecting the Obama Suite!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Oracle ACE Director, President and Commander-in-Chief Obama!
How do I know that Barak Obama is an ACE Director? Because we're staying in the same hotel! Sorry, but I find the whole thing quite exciting for some bizarre reason.
It's a monumental pain in the neck, too, of course as Tim Hall, Chris Muir and I were unable to get back to our hotel last night because all of the surrounding street had been blocked off (that warning letter the hotel left in the room makes sense now). Which was a killer and I'm using as my excuse for drinking at least 3 drinks too many. How embarassing, I could barely keep my eyes open by the time I got back last night.
When I went outside for a cigarette this morning, the place was awash with armed and armoured Secret Service, Police everywhere, dogs, army reservists, etc, etc, etc and more hotel staff hanging around than usual, too, presumably hoping to meet him
Ear-pieces *everywhere*. (Oh, and I should take this opportunity to say hello to a short, speccy, balding ear-piece-wearer back home in Edinburgh who I know is following these posts and suggest that he asks his missus to put a sock in it. I'm running very quickly in the other direction, though!)I've just been down again and everything has quietened down now so he must have gone.
P.S. I didn't tell The Boys who are here. All of the Cuddly Toys are big Obama fans, to say the least, and a) they would have wanted to meet him and probably died of shock if they actually did; b) There would have been a riot when we got home and the other Cuddly Toys found out!!!
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. But next year, I'll be expecting the Obama Suite!
Oct 16: OOW 2009 - Wednesday
I always had Wednesday and Thursday in mind as rest days, compared to the first three days and it almost worked out that way. There was certainly even more socialising although whether that was truly restful is debatable
I kicked off Wednesday by attending "HA DBA Roundtable: How Do You Make DBA's Highly Available?" at the Unconference, hosted by Alex Gorbachev and Paul Vallee of Pythian. A bunch of DBAs sitting around trying to work out the good and the bad of organisational approaches to managing databases without being constantly on the pager. It was interesting stuff although the danger of having me and Tim Hall in the room is that you can't shut us up! I'll leave it to Paul and Alex to blog about it more. I'm not sure they will, but I think they should.
Next I'd ear-marked another visit to the OTN lounge where I knew I would be able to catch up with Tom Kyte before his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session. Compared to other conferences, people are so busy at Openworld and particularly the Oracle employees that you have to grab every opportunity or you'll go through the whole week without seeing friends. Of course, as soon as I said hello and settled on the settee to start blogging, he berated me (I may be exaggerating a little) for walking out of people's presentations half-way through! I had no idea what he meant at first because I'd really enjoyed the Oracle Develop Keynote last Sunday. Then I remembered he was the host of the DBA 2.0 session too. Ooops! Must blog more carefully. It was fine and he was only kidding.
I was then torn between heading over to Oracle Closed World or staying for his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session in the lounge. I stuck around and was glad I did. Unlike some of the Heavy Hitter sessions that I won't mention, his was full of people although, as usual, people were a little reticent to ask questions so I piped up with a few to keep things going and the interviewer (Tom Haunert?) was excellent.
One piece of news I was delighted to learn is that Oracle have been working on revamping the Concepts manual which has become unwieldy in the hope of getting it back down to a 400 page book that we might have seen in the past and could be read on a plane from New York to California. In the end, they managed to get it down to around 440 pages by removing some of the ancillary features and fixed some issues such as recommending seperating your tables and indexes into seperate tablespaces Tom's recommendation is to read the latest Concepts guide where possible, particularly as many of the most fundamental concepts haven't changed much over the years. I think I'm due a re-read of Concepts, so might dig out that 11.2 version. I think this is it, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. (Certainly looks like it, though, with "Primary Authors: Lance Ashdown, Tom Kyte".)
After lunch I had to decide where to watch Larry Ellison's keynote and took what turned out to be the very sensible option of watching it in bed on my laptop. That way I could try and move on my cold recovery by having an afternoon nap. I was glad there was some Exadata talk because I'd missed Sunday night's keynote, then Arnie came on. As I was saying to someone later (APC and Tim Hall, I think), you can spot the difference between an actor (yes, yes, I know. Let's stick to professional entertainer) and politician and IT leaders. They might *think* they're swish presenters, but very few seem at ease in the way the big guy did ... and, yes, he did say 'I'll be back'. The keynote went on and on and on and as soon as Larry mentioned Fusion Apps, I switched my laptop off and fell asleep. Before anyone thinks I'm on a anti-Fusion rap again, I was just waiting to hear if he would be talking about them as everyone predicted and, once he did, that was enough for me. Oracle didn't leave me much time for sleep, though!
Mmmm, enjoyed the sleep, though, and it set me up nicely for the Appreciation Event. It seemed really quiet this year which was a) a reflection of the far lower number of attendees and b) me not having the same intense desire to see Aerosmith as others.
The company was good. Here's Marco, Jacco and Tuomas
There was a little Whack-A-Mole this year but, after selecting my favourite Cuddly Toy prize, that determined the main activity which was darts!
You can decide for yourself whether we were successful or not here.
I was impressed by Roger Daltrey. On the one hand, I grew up in an era when the thought of a 65-year-old rock guy playing to sad IT
types for stack-loads of money would make the stomach churn, but I'm quite a big Who fan and it was better than the alternatives that might have been served up. He was good, too, and there were plenty of old Who numbers.
Back to the hotel at a reasonable time, though, to set up some demos for Thursday morning's presentation. Another late night
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses.
I kicked off Wednesday by attending "HA DBA Roundtable: How Do You Make DBA's Highly Available?" at the Unconference, hosted by Alex Gorbachev and Paul Vallee of Pythian. A bunch of DBAs sitting around trying to work out the good and the bad of organisational approaches to managing databases without being constantly on the pager. It was interesting stuff although the danger of having me and Tim Hall in the room is that you can't shut us up! I'll leave it to Paul and Alex to blog about it more. I'm not sure they will, but I think they should.
Next I'd ear-marked another visit to the OTN lounge where I knew I would be able to catch up with Tom Kyte before his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session. Compared to other conferences, people are so busy at Openworld and particularly the Oracle employees that you have to grab every opportunity or you'll go through the whole week without seeing friends. Of course, as soon as I said hello and settled on the settee to start blogging, he berated me (I may be exaggerating a little) for walking out of people's presentations half-way through! I had no idea what he meant at first because I'd really enjoyed the Oracle Develop Keynote last Sunday. Then I remembered he was the host of the DBA 2.0 session too. Ooops! Must blog more carefully. It was fine and he was only kidding.
I was then torn between heading over to Oracle Closed World or staying for his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session in the lounge. I stuck around and was glad I did. Unlike some of the Heavy Hitter sessions that I won't mention, his was full of people although, as usual, people were a little reticent to ask questions so I piped up with a few to keep things going and the interviewer (Tom Haunert?) was excellent.
One piece of news I was delighted to learn is that Oracle have been working on revamping the Concepts manual which has become unwieldy in the hope of getting it back down to a 400 page book that we might have seen in the past and could be read on a plane from New York to California. In the end, they managed to get it down to around 440 pages by removing some of the ancillary features and fixed some issues such as recommending seperating your tables and indexes into seperate tablespaces
Tom's recommendation is to read the latest Concepts guide where possible, particularly as many of the most fundamental concepts haven't changed much over the years. I think I'm due a re-read of Concepts, so might dig out that 11.2 version. I think this is it, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. (Certainly looks like it, though, with "Primary Authors: Lance Ashdown, Tom Kyte".)After lunch I had to decide where to watch Larry Ellison's keynote and took what turned out to be the very sensible option of watching it in bed on my laptop. That way I could try and move on my cold recovery by having an afternoon nap. I was glad there was some Exadata talk because I'd missed Sunday night's keynote, then Arnie came on. As I was saying to someone later (APC and Tim Hall, I think), you can spot the difference between an actor (yes, yes, I know. Let's stick to professional entertainer) and politician and IT leaders. They might *think* they're swish presenters, but very few seem at ease in the way the big guy did ... and, yes, he did say 'I'll be back'. The keynote went on and on and on and as soon as Larry mentioned Fusion Apps, I switched my laptop off and fell asleep. Before anyone thinks I'm on a anti-Fusion rap again, I was just waiting to hear if he would be talking about them as everyone predicted and, once he did, that was enough for me. Oracle didn't leave me much time for sleep, though!
Mmmm, enjoyed the sleep, though, and it set me up nicely for the Appreciation Event. It seemed really quiet this year which was a) a reflection of the far lower number of attendees and b) me not having the same intense desire to see Aerosmith as others.
The company was good. Here's Marco, Jacco and Tuomas
There was a little Whack-A-Mole this year but, after selecting my favourite Cuddly Toy prize, that determined the main activity which was darts!
You can decide for yourself whether we were successful or not here.
I was impressed by Roger Daltrey. On the one hand, I grew up in an era when the thought of a 65-year-old rock guy playing to sad IT
types for stack-loads of money would make the stomach churn, but I'm quite a big Who fan and it was better than the alternatives that might have been served up. He was good, too, and there were plenty of old Who numbers.
Back to the hotel at a reasonable time, though, to set up some demos for Thursday morning's presentation. Another late night
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses.
Oct 14: OOW 2009 - Blogger's Meetup
So after a day's interesting presentations, it was time for the Cuddly Toy Meetup, but I can't really tell you how I went because I went to the Blogger Meetup, started having a good time and forgot my supervision responsibilities. All I'll say, for risk I'll be kicked out of the hotel, is that when I got back to my room, there were empty sweet bags and fizzy juice bottles all over the place! It took me an hour to clean up the mess this morning before the maid could see the after-math!
As for the Blogger Meetup, I think it was one of the best that I've been to, thanks to OTN fronting up for free drinks, Pythian supplying the T-Shirts and HP providing a Netbook as the competition prize! Alex came up with a great competition too, to keep people talking and mingling. On the front of the T-Shirt it said "I met more bloggers than you!" and people circulated the room, getting people to sign their T-shirts until, if you were a real blogger junkie, you could end up with a T-Shirt totally covered in signatures. Something like this ...
As the organiser, though, Alex was disqualified but the judging wasn't too difficult as someone had over 50 signatures! It was at that point, when they won an HP Netbook, that I realised that I should perhaps have put a little more effort in.
Regardless, it was a really enjoyable event so thanks to all those that made it happen and fellow bloggers for being good company. My only disappointment was that I kept seeing Jonah Harris, who I wanted to meet and compliment his work, and then I'd get side-tracked and that went on the whole night, even after we all adjourned to Chevy's for some Mexican food and beer.
Then Paul Vallee and Robyn Sands managed to convince me that we could use the two available wrist-bands for a private party in a night-club to get three of us in. Despite my protestations, they turned out to be right and, more to the point, it was the most lively party I've been to all week. Then again - there's Treasure Island to come tonight and the weather has improved dramatically!
Sigh. Alex G just did one of his crazy video interviews with me, so I guess that'll be turning up on a blog not too far away soon.
Updated - news just in from Edinburgh. (Why do they know about it there first?) Video is here. I'm dreading going to look at it
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. I've also started wearing T-Shirts advertising companies I used to work for, but only after they absolutely *begged* me.
As for the Blogger Meetup, I think it was one of the best that I've been to, thanks to OTN fronting up for free drinks, Pythian supplying the T-Shirts and HP providing a Netbook as the competition prize! Alex came up with a great competition too, to keep people talking and mingling. On the front of the T-Shirt it said "I met more bloggers than you!" and people circulated the room, getting people to sign their T-shirts until, if you were a real blogger junkie, you could end up with a T-Shirt totally covered in signatures. Something like this ...
As the organiser, though, Alex was disqualified but the judging wasn't too difficult as someone had over 50 signatures! It was at that point, when they won an HP Netbook, that I realised that I should perhaps have put a little more effort in.
Regardless, it was a really enjoyable event so thanks to all those that made it happen and fellow bloggers for being good company. My only disappointment was that I kept seeing Jonah Harris, who I wanted to meet and compliment his work, and then I'd get side-tracked and that went on the whole night, even after we all adjourned to Chevy's for some Mexican food and beer.
Then Paul Vallee and Robyn Sands managed to convince me that we could use the two available wrist-bands for a private party in a night-club to get three of us in. Despite my protestations, they turned out to be right and, more to the point, it was the most lively party I've been to all week. Then again - there's Treasure Island to come tonight and the weather has improved dramatically!
Sigh. Alex G just did one of his crazy video interviews with me, so I guess that'll be turning up on a blog not too far away soon.
Updated - news just in from Edinburgh. (Why do they know about it there first?) Video is here. I'm dreading going to look at it
Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses. I've also started wearing T-Shirts advertising companies I used to work for, but only after they absolutely *begged* me.
Comments