OOW07 Day 4: My presentation + Last day

The week went very fast... as the days passed by I became more tired. Good it's the last day (Thursday).

In the morning I went for breakfast with John Scott and Marc Sewtz. In the States the breakfasts are pretty heavy. With almost all dishes eggs are served. If you know it's the third day in a row you can imagine I don't need eggs when I'm back in Belgium ;-)

After breakfast I went back to my room to go once more over my presentation, making sure my pc was still alive and the demos worked.

I went to Moscone West were I followed Tony Jedlinski session about "Mastering Application Express E-Mail". I already saw that presentation before, but I wanted to support him. I know it's a challenge to present on the last day ;-)

Then it was time for my presentation: "Advanced PDF documents from Oracle Application Express using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher".

I didn't like the schedule... I not only had to present on the last day, my presentation was also the same time John had his (APEX) presentation! Normally we follow each others presentation, take some pictures and support each other. This time Apex Evangelists went head to head!

We both asked if they could change the schedule, but they didn't. It's a pity as a lot of people told me they didn't like to have to make a choice between two APEX presentations as they preferred to see both of our presentations.

John was talking about "Delivering pages in 3 seconds or less", mine was about PDF printing. Of course the people being in my session made the right decision. Did you ever hear somebody getting a raise because his page loads in 0.8 seconds instead of 0.9 seconds? Who notice that? ;-) Instead printing a nice PDF with some nice graphics to show your boss... I'm sure he'll be pleased!

Oracle gave me a very big room (capacity of about 500 people). I really liked the room, but it would be a bit too big, especially when two APEX presentations were going on the same time. I think about 60 people followed my presentation. One part of the audience were more into BI, where the other part were all into APEX.

It's a pity there are no evaluation forms at OOW as I would love to know what people really thought about the presentation. Afterwards some people came to me to say they liked the presentation, which I really appreciated. In such a big room it's difficult to "feel" the audience. It's always difficult to pitch the content. Is it too basic? Is it too advanced? If you were in my session, feel free to put a comment what you thought about it or how I can improve the presentation.

After my presentation I was really hungry and needed a drink. Last year I had Nacho's and I really wanted to taste that again. So John and I went to the same bar we held the APEX Meetup last year (and this year). In the bar we saw Doug Burns and Chris Muir and joined them. A bit later other Oracle bloggers joined us.



Afterwards we went to the OOW Wrap-Up, basically the last closing party of Oracle Open World. We had some more drinks and food. Doug, Tim, Chris walked to the Irish pub close to the Hilton hotel, but as I was so tired and wanted to drop my bag (with my laptop) I took the bus to my hotel and would join them later. In my room I dropped my bag and wanted to quickly check my mail, but I literally "crashed". I fell a sleep and before I knew a few hours passed by.
Sorry guys I didn't make it to the Irish pub anymore!

I enjoyed Oracle Open World a lot but it was also very tiring.