Home is the sailor, home from the sea

Well, not the sea and not sailing, but I am back in the UK for a week or so as sort of mid-assignment break. In this case break does not mean vacation, but more of pause in the assignment. This is very welcome as it will allow me a few days to break the back of the paper I will be presenting at Collaborate 08 in Denver. Bravely, I decided on a completely new topic and completely new material so I have a bit to do it get the paper submitted by the end of this month and the slide deck a couple of weeks later. I am quite excited by the prospect of speaking to a new audience and already I am working on the jokes for the presentation.  Of course, the other thing about making the trek across the Atlantic is that I will to hear speakers that I have come across here on the Internet but never have had the opportunity to listen to; maybe I’ll get the chance to speak to them…

The agenda is looking very good and there are a lot of sessions that really appeal to me, and as usual with a muli-track event there are a few clashes, but with some careful planning with my colleagues (Mark Rittman is presenting on the Monday, and Borkur hopes to get along too) we should be able to arrange not to miss too much.

But it is not all playing about with Oracle 11g OLAP in the next few days, Mark has other plans for me…

So what’s been going on in the past few weeks?

Well for me, not blogging a great deal. I have been working with an overseas customer and the hotel I have been staying has unreliable Internet connectivity, and coupled with the need to complete an article for an web-newsletter (more about that when it is published later this month), the need to write some course slides for a data warehouse design course and simple things like getting food (my hotel was not too near the restaurant quarter and going out at night meant wrapping up very warmly) did not leave much time to blog. There are some more data warehouse and data quality posts in the pipeline, but I suspect that the Collaborate presentation will jump to the top of the queue for a while.

Speaking about the blog, I am thinking that the time has come to split the random ramblings from the more technical posts (not least so that serious feed aggregators don’t get swamped with the so-far-off-topic stuff that I am renowned for. I have a good idea of what I will do, but need to road-test the idea first with few people, so watch this space.

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