Hello Birmingham!
It’s past Sunday midnight and I’m stuck in my room in the last couple hours finishing my slides for my masterclass tomorrow. Turns out that I’m presenting the very first session of the conference at 9am. I wish there is a keynote instead so that I could grab one more hour of sleep (it’s going to be deep into the night back home in Canada). Strange that the keynote was moved to Wednesday — I hope UKOUG has really good reason for that!
My two hours masterclass will start at the same time as Tom Kyte’s a-la keynote session — what a competition. On the other hand, there is no other sessions in server technology so I expect that folks without interest of database development will automatically end up in my session. I’m in Hall 5 – quite large room. Is it the second biggest room after the Hall 1?
I will need to work hard to keep the audience… maybe I shouldn’t plan for any breaks to make sure I don’t let folks slip out to the next sessions like James Morles’ Sane SAN 2010 or Jeremy Schneider’s Large Scale ASM.
My masterclass is based on the slides that I presented at the Oracle OpenWorld few months ago which, in turn is reworked session on Oracle Clusterware internals that I’ve done number of times as long session with demos. I thought updating this material to 11gR2 would be easy… Boy was I wrong!
11gR2 Grid Infrastructure has changes so much that it took me much much longer to get something sensible ready. I also had to limit the scope a bit as Grid Infrastructure has become so much more complex than older pre-11gR2 Clusterware. (stop complaining Alex!)
Anyway, everything is ready now and demos look reasonable. It will be a bit rough doing it first time – I’m sure I’ll stumble few times but fingers crossed we get to the end timely. I actually hope to finish early and allocate a bit more time for Q&A and potential ad-hoc demos at the end. But enough about me…
Who from Pythian are at the UKOUG conference this year? In additional to myself, it’s Christo Kutrovsky, Daniel Fink, Paul Vallee and Andrew Poodle. Christo, Dan and myself are presenting, Andrew is helping organization of MySQL track as a MySQL SIG Chair and Paul… well, I’d say Paul is a slacker so he is covering the beer tap to pay up! :)
It’s close to 2am – gotta get some sleep before tomorrow. Few words against Jurys Inn Hotel this year. It’s the first year I’m having so much troubles here including no early check-ins, not working phones, no internet in two rooms (I had to switch twice!), and somewhat unfriendly stuff this year. Has hotel management change since last year or what? Will consider another hotel next time I think.
Oh… and it’s indeed bloody cold here! So cold that it seems to impact the amount of girls-who-forgot-their-skirts-at home at the Broad Street. This unusually cold weather does impact travel plans of other conference speakers and attendees. Doug Burn seems to have been delayed for like a day and barely made it to have a pint at Tap&Spile – I wish I could accompany the crowd there until late but thanks to the awesome schedule (and unfinished state of my presentation, to be fair) I had to miss some of the fun.
PS: I have another session on Tuesday — Analysis of Oracle ASM Failability (should be Fallibility I guess but I’ll keep it misspelled simply because I can!). If anybody wants to catch up for any reason (like buying me a beer) — text me at +1 613 219 7031. iPhone doesn’t work with data-plans here for unknown reason so no twitter/email on the go.
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