UKOUG, the last day

Well that headline makes it sound a bit like the title of a book you might read on holiday, the 2000 page piece of fiction depicting the end of an epoch. But no, UKOUG carries on; the last day was the just end of the conference.

Despite a late-ish evening on the Wednesday I got to the conference centre in time to do an ad-hoc (ad-hoc goes well in data warehousing ) piece of chairing for a session that not only did not have an allocated chair it had no speaker, or more to the point a speaker that was still away on business in another country. Fortunately he had a colleague stand-in for him to present, but that left a slight timing gap as the substitute speaker travelled to Birmingham, fortunately yet another colleague of the missing man could talk through the slides in the first part of the presentation, it then needed an AV technician to sort out the problems with laptops and video projectors.

The next session to chair followed the theme of projector problems when the hall 5 project seemed to lock up Piet de Visser’s computer- and then the AV technician managed to load an old version of the presentation from flash drive to the second hall computer; which only became apparent part way through the presentation – but I think it went well; Piet presents well and the jokes were better than mine… The real shame was that he was on at the same time as Doug Burns – I think a lot of the audiences would of benefited from attending both talks. I then had to nip out to a meeting to discuss one of my forthcoming assignments and back in time to attend Mark’s BI Master Class. Then with the conference over back to my hotel to pick up the bags and the slow amble to New Street to catch my 18:30 train; on the way I found a coffee shop next to the hotel with free WiFi and cheap coffee

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