Day 1 started with a bit of a shock. My demo VM would start. It was completely wasted, so I sat through 2 Steve Feuerstein talks trying to fix it. Fortunately I had a backup of the VM, so eventually I gave up and switched to the backup. It was a little old, but good enough to do all the demos. Panic over… Later I went to presentations by Anjo Kolk (SAN Stories) and Arup Nanda (RAC case study). My talk was the last session of the day. The combination of the mornings antics and the vibration of the boats engines made me feel a little jittery. I wasn’t totally happy with my performance, but I got through it with no major hitches.
Day 2 had new delights in store. I was first speaker on. I started up my VM and all looked well. Started the presentation and bang… No Oracle. I had a quick play but decided to continue without the demos. Fortunately, good advice by Andrew Clark meant that I always bring examples of what the demos “should” do, so I was able to continue without the database. I guess I should have been a little more distracted in this session because of the problems, but the result was I actually relaxed and felt a bit more focussed. I guess it had got so bad it could only get better. 🙂 I felt like this presentation, despite the technical problems, went a lot better.
Later in the day I got to see Sten Vesterli present “What’s hot and what’s not” in the development world. It was a neat summary of the technologies out there and seemed to go down well with the audience. He speaks really well and looks very natural in front of an audience.
So now I’m in the airport on the way to the OUGF conference in Finland and I really don’t know if I have functioning demos. Joy… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…