UKOUG Blogger Meet-up and Day Two

I managed to work on my presentation a bit yesterday afternoon. I was
discussing this will Niall later on and there’s a point when you know
you are going to be finished and you’ve broken the back of it, but you
still have a lot of work to do. That’s where I am at the moment.
However, feeling a lot more relaxed, I headed along to the exhibition
opening drinks, knowing I’d bump into a few old friends. As usual, and
I’ve no idea why it works out this way, I ended up talking to various
UKOUG directors, Peter Robson, Jonathan Lewis and Peter Phillips. As
well as having known them for a while and the fact they’re thoroughly
nice chaps, there’s always something I can quiz them about. One of my
comments this year was on the new-style badges which seem a bit
low-tech, until you realise that they’re reusable for future events,
which seems like a thoroughly sensible idea in retrospect. Peter was
chuffed to bits that he’d purloined a copy of Toon Koppelaar’s book
at a presentation earlier that day 😉 I bumped into Toon earlier in
the day and practically the first words out of his mouth were ‘so have
you got past chapter 1 yet?’ Must try harder ….

Then it was the Bloggers Meet-up. I was gutted, though, because I’d received an earlier email from Andy C to explain that his UKOUG agenda
was a virtual one. That was a real shame as I’d been looking forward to
meeting him and Brian the Footballer had no-one to have a sensible
football-related conversation with 🙁 The Boys put in an appearance
and I’m sure there’ll be some photos appearing at some point (actually
I’ve just had a call from Peter Robson and he has them on a memory
stick). It seemed a lot quieter than I was expecting so maybe word
didn’t get around as much as I’d hoped, but I still met plenty of
people and had good chat. I was particularly pleased to meet Dominic Brooks, who always seems like a kindred spirit when I read his blog and I can only apologise for thinking he was Dominic Giles
at first! As usual at a conference, I was completely shattered and
retired via a quick visit to the chippy. I was in bed by 22:45. God
knows how that Alex G manages it!

At this point it’s traditional to thank Mark Rittman and the folk at
UKOUG for organising and sponsoring the event. I think I recall Last
Orders at 9:30, so we definitely put in an impressive performance on
the bar tab. Must have been all the Russian beer 😉