If It’s Wednesday, It Must Be Tallinn
Well it's stage two of my epic Seminar tour around the Baltic States, and about an hour or so ago I arrived in Tallinn for tomorrow's session. Flying out of Vilnius was interesting, it's quite an old-fashioned airport that appears to still be run by the Russian military - the only airport I know where you could starve to death, and none of the foreign exchange booths (in a different building to departures, and none after passport control) had an Estonian money... Still, joking apart, it was a great two days in Lithuania, some good attendees and a nice hotel to stay in courtesy of Oracle.
The seminar went pretty well (according to the feedback forms, anyway) although I think the language thing was a bit of an issue - I've provided fairly copious notes though so if you couldn't understand me (an easy thing to happen), at least I've written down more or less everything in the notes (all 250+ pages of them) I give out. Interestingly, unlike the first venue, Holland, none of the attendees were particularly interested in the new BI Suite Enterprise Edition, most of the interest was in data warehousing and Oracle Warehouse Builder. I think tomorrow, if it's the same in Tallinn, I'll probably drop one of the two Enterprise Edition sessions and do an extra OWB one, perhaps go into more detail around data modelling / deployment / mapping and so on. Let's see how it goes.
Anyway, better get on with ironing a shirt and working out where the local Oracle training centre is. Nothing much on the TV - it's all BBC World (v. boring), CNN (slightly more interesting), Euronews or National Geographic - funny how you miss the rubbish TV at home when you're away..
Finally, I've had to disable both comments, and searching, on this site for the time being as apparently the two perl scripts (mt-comments.cgi, mt-search.cgi) that provided this function were taking up 80% of the shared server resources, and my hosting contract only allows at most 10% server usage. So, whilst I think of what else to do - and I'm thinking pretty radical here, perhaps archiving off old posts into a PDF document, and starting afresh with Wordpress - I'm afraid you'll just have to drop me a line if you want to get in touch.