Oracle Open World 08 Plans, no UKOUG for me this year

A few years ago, I started getting too many events on my schedule for conferences, so I began using a spreadsheet to track all the sessions I wanted to attend, presentations I was scheduled to give, meetings with customers, times I had to be on booth duty, and, of course, social events I had to attend. This year’s OOW spreadsheet has 61 lines in it, so I’ll spare you the deep details. Here’s a recap of some of the most important events on my schedule over the next week (a few additions since my last posting of the same):

• Saturday, September 20 (my birthday!!), 8am: Scuba diving in Monterrey Bay
• Sunday, September 21
  • 8:30am: Oracle RAC SIG Scalability Panel
  • 10am: Building an Oracle Real Application Clusters Environment on VMWare for Free (IOUG) (S301003)
  • 4pm: Oracle RAC SIG Birds of a Feather Session
  • 7pm: Oracle Blogger Meetup, Thirsty Bear
• Monday, September 22
  • 11:30am: So, You Want to Be an Oracle ACE? (co-presented with Sheeri Cabral) (S301397)
  • 2:30pm: Oracle RAC SIG Expert Panel
  • 4pm: Oracle ACE Office Hours (OTN Lounge)
  • 7:30pm: OTN Night at the Hilton
• Tuesday, September 23
  • 3pm: So, You Want to Be an Oracle ACE? (repeated–but never the same session twice–at OTN Unconference, Overlook I)
  • 4pm: Oracle Adaptive Access Manager: What, Why, How? at OTN Unconference, Overlook I)
  • 6pm: Oracle ACE Dinner
• Wednesday, September 24
  • 11am: Communication for Geeks unconference session by Bex
  • 1pm: Oracle RAC SIG: Telecom on Oracle Real Application Clusters–Extreme OLTP
• Thursday, September 25
  • 10:30am: Oracle ACE Director Birds-of-a-Feather Tips and Techniques Panel
  • 12pm (noon): Integrating Microsoft Active Directory and Oracle Internet Directory with Database Logins: Enterprise User Security (IOUG) (S300044)
  • Heading home…

I’m also watching out for Jake’s unconference session which he said he’ll schedule onsite. In between all these events, I’ve got some sessions I’m hoping to attend as well. Of course, evenings will no doubt be filled with networking with (hopefully) lots of people I haven’t met yet as well as the usual suspects like Matt, Eddie, Jake, Bex, and lots of other cool iPhone-carrying coolkids (I don’t have one, btw).

I’ll be attempting to tweet regularly and keep my location somewhat current on Brightkite as well. Prepare for hearing a lot about how much contempt I have for my phone in the course of all that (my contract ends in November!).

On a completely unrelated note, unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the UKOUG conference in December this year as I had previously hoped. The reasons are the usual ones…priorities, money, personal obligations, etc. I’m sincerely grateful to UKOUG for accepting my session and quite unhappy that I won’t be able to attend this year. I’m already gearing up for a 3+-conference year next year with the hopes that UKOUG will be on the list. Not sure AUSOUG will make the list next year…we’ll see (there is great diving in AU, so that may influence my decisions!).

See you in a few days in San Francisco!