Conference - Day 1

An early bird? Moi?

Woke up at 4:30 AM, or 7:30AM New Zealand time, and managed to doze a little until 5:30 when I finally gave up and dragged myself out of bed. Mucked around showering and getting dressed as long as I could but still found myself at the restaurant just after 6:30 AM. Cooked breakfast with Jo, David, and a couple of others from the con.

Formal sessions

Leonie & I had two sessions, back-to-back; GL integration and then Sales Order Processing (SOP) changes. Quite a baptism by fire. As it turned out, I was the one doing most of the talking with Leonie just there in a supporting role ... Definitely not how I wanted it to play out but such is life. One embarrassing moment in the first presentation came when one of the slides went up on the screen & I looked at it and got something like stage fright. Three bullet points, the night before I knew what they all meant but at that moment my mind went blank & I had no idea what the middle one meant. Luckily Leonie was able to come to my rescue. The SOP session wasn't too great. The presentation went well, barring one question from the floor for which I was unprepared. Luckily the customer that had originally requested that feature was in the audience & when I looked pleadingly in his direction he answered the question. During the break I made sure I went and thanked him. Another question was why we changed the system to give another option on saving virtual locations. My response wasn't considered, just a simple "A customer asked us for it (pause) I looked at the request & said 'That's a reasonable request' so we did it (pause) We do listen to our customers sometimes." Laughter from the audience. Unfortunately technology let me down. I was planning to end with a quick demo and the technology let me down. The database server decided to go down. At least it wasn't our product.

Evening - Formal dinner

This started when we were walked through Seaworld to their penguin enclosure for drinks and canapes. I hadn't taken my camera with me which was a shame. The dinner was a fairly good buffet. Lots of seafood, which I really tanked up on. They had crab-legs but nothing to crack them with, I must confess to making a bit of a mess using a table knife for that. By about 10:50 I was feeling that early start & a bit jet lagged, so I excused myself and went back to my room. Again I slept like a log.