Miscellaneous

I am getting ready for several upcoming events and just working. Time sure seems to fly though, it has been several weeks since my last post! Along with TMS partner DSI, I will be presenting at an Atlanta Road Show event about solid state devices and their use in databases on Wednesday. In August Susan and I and our kids and grandkids will be going on vacation for a week, then in September it seems everything is going on. I will be taking a working vacation where the wife gets to relax but I still work every day, but hey, we will be in Helen, Ga. so at least in the evenings we can both have fun, then it is a week in San Francisco for the Open World conference (I have two presentations, I will blog about that as it gets closer), and after that a week in St. Thomas relaxing and scuba diving for my full blown vacation and somewhere in there is my High School reunion (37 years, they combined several classes in one big reunion).

In October not much other than my grandson Mikie's birthday. Then in November comes the German Oracle users group, DOAG, in Nuremberg, Germany, which looks like I will be attending. I haven't heard about my presentations there yet, but will let you all know as soon as I do!

I haven't heard about my nominations for Oracle Ace yet, I know I got several recommendations from other Oracle Aces on it but sometimes things take a while.

Other than that we just spent a weekend diving at Loch Low-Minn Quarry, a PADI dive resort just outside Athens, Tennessee, I blogged about it here.

AS plans tighten up (Oracle Ace status, DOAG) I will blog more about it! Oh, did I mention I am going to be a grandfather for the third time? I should know more about that (like the sex of the baby) later this month as well.

Enough rambling I guess! Talk to you all later!

ODTUG 2010

I am waiting in the National Airport in DC for my flight back to Atlanta after being just a vendor at ODTUG. Neither of the papers I submitted made the cut this year, so I was relegated to booth duty alone. There were around 1000 attendees from what I could garner from various folks, so it was an average year. We had good traffic to the booth, not great mind you, but several folks who seemed interested a day.

On Wednesday night they had a stand-up comic. I felt kind of sorry for him as his jokes were more miss than hit. I am afraid that getting comics for tech conferences tends to be a risky venture. Let me tell you why I think that is the case.

Most comics are aiming their humor at the average person. Unfortunately the average person has an IQ around 100 or less and is generally pretty near the stereotype for their gender. From what I have observed most techies (at least in the Oracle field) tend to be well above average intelligence (110-120 IQ) and are not stereotypical. Most women I have met in the Oracle field are driven, goal oriented and usually not vain, object driven clothes horses. Most men in the Oracle world seem to be more “metrosexual” in their way of life, cooking, cleaning and generally not being slobs with little focus outside of jobs, sports and other male dominated pursuits. Given this misqueue between what most comics are setting their humor for and what the average Oracle nerd really is like you can see why much of the stereotype driven humor falls on deaf ears.

Anyway, overall the conference seemed successful with most people I asked saying they enjoyed the talks and got value from the presentations, even if the show on Wednesday left many of us not laughing.