PSOUG

So I did spend Thursday hanging with the folks at PSOUG for the first day of "Oracle Days". My take is that PSOUG is driving the beginning of something special. They're beginning to build up some traction with the Oracle user community in the Pacific Northwest. While I'm primarily an apps and apps technology guy, and Oracle Days seemed to draw more of a database and developer crowd, even I could see the momentum building. The Pacific Northwest is more than a little geographically isolated from an Oracle community perspective - it's good to see a regional community coming together. If you missed Oracle Days this year, be sure to make it next time...there's good stuff coming together.

On a more personal note, Seattle is a beautiful city. This was my first trip there, but I'm thinking I may go back for a few days later this summer. If I do, however, it's a pretty safe bet I won't fly Alaska Airlines again. This trip was my first with Alaska. On the return, I got lazy and checked my brand-new American Tourister bag - bad move. You can see what Alaska did to my bag here, here, and here. Some of the contents were also damaged - pics here and here. Still waiting to hear from Alaska about any type of consideration for the damage.

One last note on the flying experience. For some reason, any bag I check been searched on every trip I've taken since 9/11. Funny how I'm cleared to work on NASA projects, but I seems to be on some type of hot list with the TSA...think I may pack some of those paper pop-up snakes in my bag for my flight to OpenWorld this year, just to see what happens ;)

An Exciting Week

A couple of occurrences over the past two days have really made my week.

I took a call from an old friend at Oracle yesterday. I've accepted the opportunity to serve as a judge for the Oracle Excellence Awards again this year. The awards are given to Oracle customers and partners who are creatively using Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards etc) to create innovative and standards-based technology solutions. I'm honored to be a judge and excited about the change to learn of the creative ways that apps customers and partners are leveraging Fusion Middleware. If you're doing something nifty along these lines in your own shop, tell us about it; you might win an award! Nominations are open until August 8th.

I'm also off to Seattle, presenting on the first day of Oracle Days, a conference hosted by the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group. I'm pretty excited about this event. I really enjoy the exchange of ideas that takes place at a good conference. In addition, I've never had the chance to hang with the PSOUG folks before. Wish I could stay longer than a day, but a day is better than nothing. Be sure to swing by and say hello if you happen to be attending the conference.

Yup, it's an exciting week...