Flying out to Lithuania and Estonia

Mark Rittman -

I'm up at 5.00am tomorrow morning for the next leg of my BI Seminar, this time in Lithuania and Estonia. I've never been to the Baltic states before; In terms of behind the former Iron Curtain, I've been to the Czech Republic for a weekend break, but never so close to Russia and never on a professional basis. To be honest, it was the chance to visit countries like this that led me to sign up for the seminar series; Lithuania isn't the sort of country I'd normally get to visit, and you get a totally different perspective working in a country compared to visiting as a tourist - it'll be interesting as well to see the contrast between the old medieval architecture, the soviet-style buildings and what's been developed recently in the new part of the city. There's certainly a buzz around these two countries and it'll be fascinating to take a look first-hand.

I'm flying out from Gatwick and landing in Vilnius around 1.30pm, which should give me a few hours in the afternoon to have a look around Vilnius Old Town. Taking my lead from WikiTravel, the Gediminas castle and the Cathedra Basilica look worth seeing, and there's a monument to Frank Zappa which sounds pretty cool. The seminar is in the Crowne Plaza Hotel, M. K. Ciurlionio str. 84, which is where I'll also be staying for the two nights; from looking at the hotel web site there's also gym which'll be handy as the seminar finishes each day at 4.30pm.

On Wednesday I fly out from Vilnius to Tallinn, Estonia, for two more days of the seminar. This time I'm staying at the Radisson SAS (which looks rather posh) in Tallinn, with the seminar actually at the local Oracle training centre at Roosikrantsi 11, 10119 Tallinn. I should then get another couple of nights, the Thursday and the Friday, to take a look around. Again looking through WikiTravel Tallinn has a beautifully preserved old town, and probably the biggest and most commercial of the Baltic states capital cities although they all seem pretty up-and-coming. All in all it should be an interesting few days, hopefully I'll pluck up the courage to venture out on my own after the seminars and try and take a look around; whilst I was in Utrecht I spent most evenings brushing up on the seminar materials, but hopefully by now I'm fairly familiar with it and should get a bit of time off in the evenings.

I'm off to pack now, including my new-and-improved disaster recovery setup should my macbook give up the ghost whilst I'm away. Of course having a Mac means that it's unlikely I'll be able to get hold of a replacement machine from the local Oracle office, so whatever I do has got to be cross-platform. Like Tom, all my examples and so on are on a virtual machine, but for me it's Parallels as it's (currently) the only VM solution that works across Mac-Windows-Linux. Thankfully, a VM created with one version will work with the others, so I can run a backup of my (Mac created) virtual machine on Windows laptop running Parallels on that. The other problem is that my backup 80Gb USB hard drive is HFS formatted and therefore not natively readable on a Windows PC, so therefore I've put the following solution in place.

  • A 1Gb USB memory stick, with MacDrive (free 5 day trial) and the Windows version of Parallels Workstation, together with the CD key, and a copy of the slides and notes
  • A 80Gb USB hard disk, HFS formatted with the virtual machine containing Oracle 10.2, BI Suite SE and BI Suite EE, OWB and sample data

It'll make my life a lot easier when VMWare comes out of beta for the Mac (I'll be able to use the free VMWare viewer) and I could make life a bit easier for myself if I reformatted by USB hard disk in FAT32; I'll probably do the reformat soon but wait until the Maui release of BI EE comes out (on Linux) before reworking the virtual machine.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll post photos and so on when I get to Vilnius.