Hotsos Wrap-up

I’m sitting having a cold beer, waiting to go out to DFW airport so I thought I’d offer a few closing thoughts on my Hotsos Symposium 2007 experience. It also gives me a chance to fill in a few blanks I left.

Highs

• Receiving Austin, the Armadillo from Bill Thater. (Sadly, I don’t have the heart to tell him that The Boys have got wind of this, checked out Austin on the blog and are insisting ‘we’re not letting *that* into the house!’ They’re just a little cramped and tetchy on the comfy seat but they’ll come round … they always do.)

• New friends, as always. Please do not be offended by your ommission (the list is simply too long and doesn’t include existing friends that it was the usual pleasure to meet), but it made my week to meet :-

• Mark Williams who as well as having a photographic memory for my old blog entries which caught me out on numerous occassions, has a much more mischievous sense of humour than I’d guessed from that professional-looking photo on OTN!

• Peter Bach, a fellow member of the Oak Table who was all the way over from Australia, in transit to Oracle’s San Francisco offices. Peter and I seem to have a lot of shared views, shared taste in food and alcohol and he even dumped his liquids on me (a bottle of Coke, I should be clear) before heading off to deal with U.S. airport security 😉

• The guys from Amis. Marco I already knew (a little), courtesy of some teddy bear photos he loaned me for my blog and his cool post on Oracle Version 4.1! They were both great company, full of energy and solid arguments.

• Carol Dacko who, again, I ‘kind of’ knew electronically and remembered seeing her around the place last year. Carol’s a lovely woman and not one I’m going to bump into very often as we work in different continents, but I appreciate her excellent dinner organisation skills as well as a few words of moral encouragement before I presented. Thanks, Carol. (Oh, and I think I’m meant to say ‘Go Blue!’ at this point, aren’t I?)

• My presentation. Yes, folks, I was pretty happy with my presentation for a change. It was nothing earth-shattering but I heard some pretty positive comments afterwards and I enjoyed giving it.

• Several top-quality presentations but I suppose my favourites were Christian Antognini’s RAC/PX/DW presentation; Jonathan Lewis’ Statspack presentation and the second half of the Training Day on RAC, but I can truthfully say I didn’t attend a bad presentation. One or two were lacking in technical detail for me personally, but that was because they weren’t really aimed at me, in my opinion. I really liked Bob Sneed’s presentation, too, but would have enjoyed the four hour version more, I think!

• The organisation, quality of the food (something to eat at every opportunity!) and overall atmosphere of the conference, well done Rhonda and her Hotsos colleagues!

• The excellent quality of the questions I was asked and discussions I was part of all week. If there is something that sets this Symposium apart from some other events, it’s the high standard of knowledge exhibited by the attendees! As Cary mentioned in his closing speech, it keeps everyone on their toes and that’s as it should be. No matter how much I might moan about being busy, I truly appreciate people taking the time to discuss parallel ‘stuff’ with me.

• Oooh, I almost forgot my flight out here. Nice. Only Business class back tonight, but I suppose I’ll just have to get by 😉

Lows

• Realising on Friday afternoon that my UK/US power socket adaptor had dropped out of my bag in my very short trip out for lunch. Maybe … I have no idea, but I hunted high and low for it in warm conditions – a lovely way to spend an afternoon 🙁. Knowing that I was due to carry out some DST patching for a client on Saturday morning, I freaked out initially. Then I calmed down when I realised this was a (fairly) upmarket hotel, so I would just borrow one from the hotel, or buy one in the shop. Yeah, right! I might as well have been an alien asking if he could plug in his tractor-beam. I was really shocked by the reaction, to be honest, and I was 5 minutes away from a rather ill-considered, aggressive blog when my gentle promptings (trust me, I’m never rude in these situations) elicited a map to the nearest Radio Shack from the concierge. Of course it was 4 miles away (because, everything is a minimum of several miles away round here) and the taxi driver seemed offended that I’d hired him but, eventually, I dashed into the ‘local’ Radio Shack to be met by the perfect (older) gentleman who understood what I was talking about and calmly took me to the back of the shop and produced the required item. It was their last one and he commented that they really needed to watch their stock level on this item because they only ever seemed to have one left. Given the earlier reactions, I questioned if there was much demand. ‘Oh, yes’, he said, ‘with the proximity of the airport and all these businesses, we have regular requests for these’. Mmmmm, *quite*. Omni Mandalay, get a grip. In place of all those Omni Mandalay sweatshirts in the hotel shop, maybe an international power adaptor or two? Still, the problem was solved, I was a happy man and all I can say is, thank you Mr. Radio Shack!

• Having to polish off my paper in a hurry. Oh, well, I should start earlier so it’s my fault entirely. In fact, I’d better go and start work on the DTrace presentation for the Miracle Scotland Database Forum.

• Only making about half of the presentations that I could. I’ve now realised that this is about as much as I can expect when you’re trying to keep personal stuff going on, prepare for a presentation and catch up with people you know. In fact, half is ok and I can live with that, but I think it’s time I started using an Out-of-Office autoreply before I got to a conference. It is *not* the holiday that people think it is!