OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – It’s a wrap!

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

  1. OTN Nordic Tour 2013
  2. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Stockholm
  3. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Copenhagen
  4. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Oslo

I’ve already done a bunch of thank you messages in the individual posts, but I just want to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone involved once more.

Thanks to everyone at ORCAN, DOUGOUGNOTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen. Thanks to the other speakers for being involved and trying to help organise me. Big thanks go out to all the attendees that turned up to these events. I hope to see you all soon.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Stockholm

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. 🙂

After those two sessions, I presented three sessions in a row, including my first ever WebLogic presentation. Eeeccckkk! I made it very clear I was not an expert! The approach was, this is what I wished I had known in my first hour of learning WebLogic! I think it went well. I got some helpful feedback from Lonneke, which I’ve added to the presentation.

After my last presentation we went straight from the conference to the airport. There was a problem with the boarding scanners, so we had to be processed manually, which meant we were about an hour late in departing. That meant we were too late to have dinner with the Danish OUG folks, which was a pity. So it was straight from the airport to bed.

Thanks very much to everyone that came to my presentations in Sweden, to ORCAN for inviting me and to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for letting me take part in the event. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ORCAN Day 1 & 2…

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…

ORCAN Day -1

I started out from home at 03:00 this morning, so I decided it wasn’t a good idea to go to bed, in case I slept through the alarm. I’m now in Stockholm feeling incredibly tired, which is hardly a surprise. 🙂

I suppose I should have a look round as last time I was here is was raining and I didn’t take many photos. Maybe I’ll just go to bed though…

Cheers

Tim…

Orcan Update…

I’ve been in Sweden for the last few days at Orcan, the Swedish Oracle User Group. The event was held in the Yasuragi Hasseludden hotel about 20 minutes outside Stockholm. I was a surprised when I arrived as the hotel is a Japanese Spa and it didn’t really seem to be an obvious place to hold a conference. As it turned out it was a great choice. The atmosphere was very relaxing and the social event involved sitting and chatting in a hot bath then going for food. It sounds a bit strange, but it was good fun.

Some of the sessions were in Swedish, so I took the opportunity to use the spa facilities, including a flotation tank. It’s quite freaky lying in a big plastic bubble full of salt water with no light or sound. Sensory deprivation is a strange thing…

It was good to see some familar faces (Julian Dontcheff and Laurent Schneider) and meet some new people including Joel Goodman.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Patrik Norlander for inviting me to speak at the event and thanks to everyone who attended my talks. Hope to see you all again soon.

I think I’m going to be at home for the next few months. It looks like I’ll be in Chile, Bulgaria and Finland in the middle of next year, but for the moment life is back to normal…

Cheers

Tim…