Advert – Future Plans

After over a year at my current site, I’ve decided that it’s time for something new. I’m currently involved in a Grid Control and Audit Vault implementation project but I’ll only be spending another 6 weeks on that. My current client have one of their best permies working on it, too, and 7 weeks gives them plenty of time to look for a replacement contractor if they decide that’s what they want.

So, what next? Well I want some time to play and I don’t mean Wii games. Maybe I could say I want to do some research but that seems a little pretentious for my usual efforts. Let me just say that I want to spend a month working from my office at home doing nothing but looking at Oracle, investigating a few features and probably reading some of those books in my massive pile – refreshing my technical skills, in other words. Maybe I’ll write a paper or two.

I do know that I’ve been putting off some improvements to the 10g Performance Course before I teach it again. Whilst the first public teach in Prague went very well, judging by the feedback from the attendees and Oracle, I could think of several things I wanted to improve. My highest priorities are improving the agenda and including more detail in the course notes and that will take more time than is left spare when I’m on a client site five days a week and have another life away from Oracle. There’s a possibility I’ll be teaching it in Austria in August, so keep an eye out for that, and I have reasonably firm dates of 16th and 17th October in Belgium (Kurt insisted I should mention it soon).

However, I’d also like to teach an additional course at home during my non-client time, so I’m keen to determine if there’s any interest in a course in the UK during August. I think it would be a fun event if I could run a small course in Edinburgh while the Festival is on. Accommodation is hard to come by at that time of year (let me worry about that, though), but a couple of days in Scotland with some decent learning and discussion during the day, followed by pleasant sunny evenings when Edinburgh is at it’s best seems an attractive proposition to me. Then again, a course in London might be easier for people to attend? I’m open to ideas, but if anyone is interested in the possibility, then leave a comment here or drop me an email at my usual email address (you can find that on my cv elsewhere on this site if you don’t know it already). Because I want to teach more again, I’m not looking to make a big profit from the event. However, I expect a small number of attendees without the marketing might of a large training company (which is good, from the attendees point of view) so I’m looking at a guide price of £500-600 for the two days. Accommodation and transport would be at your own expense.

Once I’ve updated the agenda, I’ll post it here in the next couple of days.

Oh, but here’s the emotional clincher 😉 My 16 year old daughter has an interest in event management so, if we do go ahead, it’ll give us a chance to work together on putting on a two day event we can both be proud of, before she goes off to college.