Monday, 26th of November, 2007.

I set my alarm at 6:30 so that I can finish all my morning procedures on time and register earlier. It wasn’t too difficult to wake up early today as I was in bed before midnight yesterday. Babette has already posted some details about yesterday and I only need to sort out my photos to add some “coloring” to it (at some point I’ll figure out how to do that on time!).

I registered at about 8:30 and went to the speaker prep. room. I was looking for internet there but…

When I first saw the label, I thought it’s some kind of a ba

Quick sum up of my previous post – I’m in Sydney this week and getting ready for my AUSOUG “snoitatneserp” next week. (Note that I wrote it in Sydney last week and only now managed to get the photos sorted out — sorry for the delay).

Thursday evening I was honored with a visit to Noons’ house. We had done a very nice walk around his place through Warriewood Wetlands. It was one of the most amazing walks I had –- a walking path via jungle style swamp (heh… they call it wetlands).

I saw many bird species but couldn’t remember the names – sorry Nuno, I know you tried your best. Actually, I think I do remember at least one – Kukubara Kookaburra (thanks Nuno!). Birds were beautiful and some fellows you can see here courtesy of Noons. I also saw few iguanas “water dragons” lizards (thanks Sarah) on the way and they ran away quickly as soon as they realized that I’m watching them.

It’s amazing that such a magical place can be so close to Sydney –- it took us only 40 minutes by car to get there from Sydney CBD but we had to leave early to get ahead of the traffic and not everyone drives as aggressive as Portuguese do.
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I’m going to present couple sessions at the Australian Oracle User Group Conference in Melbourne next week. It’s the first time I’m presenting Down Under and I’m looking forward to it, although I’m still not sure if I should start from the last slide and proceed backward . . .

Since it’s more than a day of flying only one way, it wouldn’t be smart to go for only two days, so I’m taking the opportunity to spend this week with my Sydney colleagues — Paul Moen and Andrey Goryunov. I should mention that Australia is the first country I ever visited. I fell in love with this country seven years ago when I came from Russia in February. Culture shock and dramatic weather change set the tone for how I feel about Australia for the rest of my life. So hello Sydney — I’m back!

I was supposed to fly Ottawa-Vancouver-Honolulu-Sydney, my flight leaving from Ottawa at 8:00AM on Saturday. I was packing until very late and finished only by 3 AM. No surprise that, although I set my alarm clock to 6:00AM, I forgot to switch it on for the weekend days. The net result: Olga woke my up at 7:30. Anyway, Air Canada was very nice to re-route me through Toronto so that I still could make my connection in Vancouver . . . so $50 for an additional 1.5 hour sleep — not a bad trade at all!

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Today was a much better day than yesterday. I managed to get more than eight hours sleep and felt very rested when I woke up. Plus, my bags finally arrived at the hotel while I was sleeping, which was especially fortuitous as my “EASY buttons” were in the suitcase. Last year I asked Connor McDonald if they had Staples in Australia. His reply was “Yes, and we have paper clips too!” So I brought him the famous (at least in our office) “EASY button” from Staples.

I thoroughly enjoyed Penny Cookson’s session on Oracle 11g Performance Tuning: Making Oracle Boring. It was very informative, yet easy to follow and understand. I followed that session with Megh Thakkar’s session on Oracle Partitioning for Data Warehouses.

This afternoon I attended Duncan Mills’s session on ADF task Flow and Connor’s session “Once around the Block”. Plus John Garmany’s session “Oracle Streams OR Logical Standby, which is right for you.”

It is now evening after the first day at the AUSOUG Conference in Perth, Australia. This is my first time attending AUSOUG, and I have found it much smaller and more personal than others I have attended. The food has been excellent, and more importantly (because I really needed it) there was lots of coffee out when I got there and for several hours after.

I was fortunate to present right after the opening session, so I could relax and enjoy the rest of my day. There were some interesting questions and audience participation near the end of my presentation (on LDAP and Oracle Application Server), most notably dealing with the issue of having a set of employees in one group and “moving the entire group of employees” within the LDAP Directory.

The exhibition hall was open all day, so I went there between sessions. No matter how many times I tell myself that I don’t need more stuff, I always find things at the exhibit hall that I want. Today, I picked up a red Red Hat hat.

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For some reason, the advertising slogan, “Getting there is half the fun,” keeps going through my mind. Well, I certainly would not describe my trip to Perth, Australia as “fun”. Five different plane boardings (only once onto the same plane); four times standing in line to get boarding cards; problem with travel visa (I missed putting both of my middle names on the forms); lost luggage; and canine inspection of luggage and confiscation of my apples. (At least I declared that yes, I did have fruit with me . . . but by not throwing it out before the dogs found it, I got to go to the end of an extra line to discuss the issue.)

My original flight from Chicago to Los Angeles was delayed nearly two hours. The plane I switched to had only three of its six lavatories working, and none of the overhead lights in my section working.

I’m pretty tired. And, I’m presenting at the AUSOUG National Conference Series 2007 at 10:30 tomorrow morning. I’m sooooo glad that, since I packed too many clothes to fit in my suitcase, I had to pack one outfit in my carry-on bag. I am also grateful to Qantas for providing an amenity bag with lightweight T-shirt and shorts . . . so I have pajamas, too.

All in all, it was a long, grueling trip. On the plus side, I did meet some wonderful people — Andrew and Sumit, who sat on either side of me on the longest flight, were especially kind and helpful and pleasant to sit and chat with. And in Melbourne, where I had the most problems with making it through a zillion line-ups (immigration/lost luggage/special services for ticket problems), countless people offered to let me ahead of them so I would be able to catch the final flight out at 12:15. A big “thank you” to all of them!