Flying Back from New Zealand

Well, that's it for now, I'm waiting in the airport to catch my flight back to the UK, after running the last of the BI seminars in Auckland yesterday. Another good turnout, a very nice audience made up of customers and partners, and the seminar itself went pretty smoothly given that it's the third time I've run it in five days. Thanks again to Oracle for getting me over here, hopefully everyone that's come along has got a good idea of how development works now with the new BIEE tools, and hopefully I've inspired a few people to go over to OTN, download BIEE and give it a go.

By the end of the week, I even had the JDeveloper/BIEE/SOA Suite demo working pretty flawlessly, although to be honest, at the end of eight hours of demos and talks from me, most people were happy with an overview of how it works rather than watching me noodling around with JDeveloper for an hour - I'll save this one for BIWA and OOW, where I'm doing a full one-hour talk on this and nothing else.

New Zealand (or more properly, Auckland) certainly made an impression on me. Most people over here, and in Australia, said that the two countries were very similar, but to me they certainly seemed quite a bit different. Australia (or at least Sydney and Melbourne) were very American influenced, very modern, very bright and sunny, whilst New Zealand was a lot more like home - not quite as brash, a bit more down to earth, and of course the weather and landscape was much more like the UK. I liked them both - Australia was very inspiring, a great holiday destination, sunny, fantastic views and so on, whilst in New Zealand, I felt really at home, everyone was just really nice, you can imagine bringing the kids over here and it being a really great family place.

One of the big impressions I got of New Zealand was just how far it was from everwhere - the nearest country in Australia and that's four hours away on a plane, and to an extent, if you live here that's got to be one of the attractions for you. Certainly New Zealand, like Australia and the States, is one of the places that I've visited and afterwards could definately see myself living in, I think it might be a little too quiet for me but I can certainly see the attraction. It's a shame I didn't have time to get out of Auckland and go down to the South Island - I'd love to have seen the mountains, the fjords, go to visit Nelson and Christchurch. Perhaps when the kids are a bit older, I'll bring them back for a couple of weeks and we can visit the country properly.

Anyway, it's back to the UK now, but via Hong Kong so hopefully without the hassle going through US Immigration. We're flying back via the timezones, so although it's a 24 hour flight I'll arrive back in the UK around Sunday afternoon. Then, it's the BIRT SIG on Tuesday, a day up in London with a client on Wednesday, then back up to the airport again for a trip to the Netherlands to do some training, then back to the UK to catch a flight to Washington for the BIWA Summit in Reston, Virginia. It'll be nice to get home though, if only for a couple of days.