and the somber looking blog page design has given way to something looking a little crisper and bluish to match my eyes and that jacket. The jacket might make an outing from the wardrobe and head to London for the BIRT SIG meeting; Mark Rittman has the details (of the meeting, not the jacket) The jacket will not make it to Scotland though for the Miracle Database forum. The organiser, Thomas Presslie, has done his best to convince me to wear a kilt for the conference dinner – do I owe it to the others to expose my legs or do I do the decent thing and remain covered? Time (and any other bloggers there) will tell.

I am still struggling with a good idea for the UKOUG conference in December and only have a few days left to submit an abstract. The reason behind my problem is simple. A lot has been going in the Oracle BI space both with ETL and the tool sets available to report information but not so much is new in the database (I suspect that Oracle 11 might change a few things though) so a paper slanted towards database developers or DBAs may not be so well received as one on tools or better yet a war story of how “I implemented SOA reporting over a live transactional feed and still had time to build a dashboard” In fact, I think I would prefer to sit in on tools presentations than a database talk. Of course there are other reasons that finding a topic is difficult – most are related to my ability to talk about customers’ implementations. I do have a couple of ideas though and will sound them out over the next couple of days.

Back to the new blog theme – the photo (or really, three photos joined together in Photoshop) is from August 2005 and was taken a couple of days after some high-level snow in the Swiss Alps