UKOUG 2006 - What a Week!

I'm back now from the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, and as my wife is now away for the weekend, it's my turn to look after the kids for a few days - which is quite nice actually, as I'm away all next week doing seminars in Dublin and Reading. After the week I've had though, it's nice to get home and start assessing the damage from last week...

As probably most of you know, my blog got trashed by my hosting provider last week after they re-installed the server and then found they'd not included my mySQL databases in any of the backups they'd been doing over the last few months (years, maybe). As Wordpress is database driven and there are no static pages to fall back on, and as they deleted the Moveable Type database at the same time, I'm screwed basically and have lost all the content. Anyway, I've been touched by all the messages of sympathy and offers to help out, and later on I'm going to post an appeal where anyone who wants to help out, can take a batch of cached pages from Google and reload them onto the blog for me, a sort of "distributed recovery" - more on this later.

Anyway, the week started off for me with my coming down with a cold, but by the Tuesday it wasn't too bad and I was able to do my talk, go along to Tom's keynote, and chair Lisa and Pete's presentations later in the day. As I wasn't a "civilian' for this event and had to do stand duties, Tuesday was the only real day I could go along to talks, but I was able to get away from the stand for a few hours during the week and of course I managed to catch up with most people I know as they wandered around the exhibition.

Of course the highlight was catching up with old friends, and meeting up for the first time with people such as Kevin Cosson and Alex Gorbachev that I only really knew from their blogs. During the week, I managed to spend some quality time with people such as Peter Scott, Lisa Dobson, Mogens Norgaard, Thomas Presslie, Mike Durran, Doug Burns, Andrew Clarke, Jon Mead, Jonathan Lewis, Pete Finnigan and Niall Litchfield, and of course the bloggers' event was a chance to meet up with people such as Tim Hall who weren't at the event but lived locally. Anyway, rather than soak up everyone's bandwidth with a load of photos, here a link to a flickr set and separate links to some of the better ones:

Anyway, as well as having a cold and losing three and a half-years work, I didn't have my own laptop or an internet connection all week, hence the uncharacteristic lack of blog entries last week. Still, the lack of any ability to actually do anything about the site loss last week was probably a good thing, as it meant I had to just get over it and go and do something else, but as I said I'll post something else soon where anyone who wants to help can give me a hand recovering some of the old content. Watch this space.