Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

RMOUG – Here I Come February 9, 2013

Well, I’ve just finished pushing the last few bits into my suitcase for my trip to the US for the Rocky Mountain User Group Training Days 2013.

It is a few years since I went to the US for pleasure (3 years?) and much longer since I went there on a combined work/pleasure trip – as I HATE going through US immigration.

I was tempted into this trip when I met up with a fellow OakTable member Tim Gorman at the Slovenia User Group last October. Tim was a true gentleman throughout that conference (and this is not to detract from the kind ministrations of Jože Senegačnik who was a wonderful host and also a fellow OakTable member) and he suggested I put forward a talk or two to the RMOUG training days conference. I was in two minds due to my huge dislike of being shouted at by the {I am sad to say, usually bl00dy unfriendly} members of the US immigration services. I mean, I went to Moscow in around 1994 and those chaps in the USSR were positively oozing cordial welcome compared to the hard-nosed and antagonistic attitude of the US chaps a year or two later!

Anyway, Tim swayed my opinion in a simple and direct manner. He mentioned Skiing. I went skiing in 1992. My one and only Skiing holiday. I loved it, I spent 2 weeks going from terrified starter to someone who could swish down Blue runs with the rest of them, the occasional Red run towards the end. Not Black, I saw enough sad-looking stretchers coming down from the Black runs as I sat in the bars at the bottom to think there was something to be scared of there – and when I chatted to the barman in my chosen watering hole he told me how so many of them were us Brits who had lost the brains to realise what our limits were.

So, I will be at the conference doing my bit about “first things to know about Exadata” and then I will be up in the mountains, scaring myself on hills that when I was 20 looked like a walk in the park…. What is the betting I do not get as far as Red runs this time?!?