As you already know, I’ve spent a whole week near Redwood, California. Saying that the week has been difficult to manage is a euphemism:

• My heater engine broke at home (I didn’t even know it had an engine!), almost leaving my children in the cold for a night. Thank you, people have been so helpful that day!
• The snow storm in Canada prevented my plane from taking off from Chicago to Ottawa Saturday afternoon.
• The same snow storm prevented even the bus from leaving Boston after I decided this could have been the best, and only way to go, and found a plane to go there.
• And many more bad stories I don’t want to talk about . . .

However, the week has been more than useful. I have worked very hard, and had some very good fun too. As always, I’m amazed what people are able to do with Oracle technologies. We’ve learned a lot from the good and bad experiences of several Oracle customers. Unfortunately, there is not a lot I can tell you.

Here is something I can share anyway: one of the things I’ve liked the most is to spend some time (not enough!) with Kuassi Mensah. The guy is awesome! As a Product Manager at Oracle, he knows probably everything about JServer (the JVM in Oracle 11g), and he is one of the best guys on the subject of some of the key connection layer to access an Oracle database, including JDBC, OCI, and Web Services.

If you’re interested by any of those subjects, you should subscribe to his 360° blog and read his book. If you’re lucky and can attend the Conférence PHP Québec in Montréal this week, rush to his presentations, especially the one about the Database Resident Connection Pool.

Hey Kuassi! I hope the weather will be nice in Canada now that I’m back home. However, you may have to rename your blog “36°” for the end of the week — which is not so bad in this winter.

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