Preparing for Open World 2006

I am going to San Francisco this year, courtesy of OTN's complementary Open World passes for ACEs. Fortunately my Technical Director has agreed to authorise the expenses, which are coming out of a marketing bucket - so expect to see me in an LCMG polo shirt :) I'm joining Mark Rittman and Tim Hall in the Brit enclave in the King George Hotel, which sounds rather interesting. Apparently they do afternoon tea in the English manner. With luck this means BOP in a pot and not a teabag in a chipped mug.

However, I won't just be swanning around SF: I'm speaking too. OOW has accepted my abstract on developing PL/SQL with automated unit tests. To be honest I wasn't expecting this, as my submission was a last minute impulse. I had had some nice feedback from the presentation I did on utPLSQL at the UKOUG DE SIG last month, so I thought, what the heck. A good call, as it turns out. Apart from anything else, the best way to defuse co-workers' accusations of going on a jolly is a rejoinder of, "I'm presenting, actually".

I have mixed feelings about my third OOW. San Francisco is a cool place and I'm really looking forward to going back there again. It will also be nice to meet up with some of my fellow ACEs in meatspace rather than the forums. I hope the OTN area has a prime location this year. But the scale of the OOW2K6 enterprise is daunting. Indeed, 41,000 delegates is a scary prospect. There are towns smaller than that. It will be interesting to see how the facilities cope. Last year was bad enough. Between sessions the corridors of the Moscone centre were filled migrating geeks. The queue for Larry's keynote was already outside the building an hour before he was due to start talking. And that was a mere 29,000 delegates.

This year I foresee Soviet-era length queues for everything: Starbucks' coffee, internet access, the toilets. This is where jetlag gives us Europeans an edge: we're up and wanting to check our e-mail whilst the natives are still asleep. A good strategy for a successful conference will be to figure out where everybody is heading and go some place else. Avoid the queues by choosing minority-interest sessions. Face it, you're not going to get into any of Tom Kyte's presentations unless you take a sleeping bag and camp out in the foyer overnight. So come and hear me talk instead.