Posted by Firstly, I hope everyone had a great Christmas…I took a few weeks off in December which explains the blog hiatus…but back to the grind stone now 
Well, day 2 started much like day 1….4am the internal body clock told me to get up, and thus I did some work on my slides, and then promptly fell back to sleep and missed the first session on the morning.
I went to Alex’s (http://nuijten.blogspot.com/) presentation on Analytics, a personal favourite topic of mine, since I’ve done talks myself on it, and I always like seeing someone else’s take on it. I also liked the clean format of his slides – in fact, one of the cool things I’ve seen at all conferences around the world in the past year, is the abandonment of “corporate templates” in favour of the just high quality content. I’d like to think I’ve had a small influence in that, but I like the trend.
Next up was my own talk on the saga of upgrades I had in 2011. Its a funny talk to give, because there’s not a lot of technical content but because of the stress and pain those upgrades had, I still get a physiological response when I’m doing the talk – I get sweaty and adrenalin – all memories of a time when we nearly lost millions of dollars with a down system. But the talk went well and I felt like a rock star because my ugly mug was on the big screen behind the stage
I was pretty much spent after that – I tried to catch John B’s talk on ASH and Jonathan Lewis’s talk on the optimizer, but as I felt myself falling to sleep in each, I had to give up and head back to the hotel for a sleep. A hour of recovery sleep, and I was back Luca’s talk on storage options at CERN and Ray Wang’s keynote.
Then it was off to the masquerade ball. I bombed out about 11pm, but apparently many Oakies partied hard into the night!
Learning is not a spectator sport 