Tuesday, March 20, 2012

OUGN 2012 Day -1

Tomorrow is the big day. For the last 4 years our annual conference has been on a cruise ship from Oslo to Kiel and back. That is two days with presentations, fun and stuff. A big success we are not going to change at least this year. But, for this conference, we sent out too many invitations to Very Important Presenters and got an impressive positive response; we run out of slots pretty fast. (Let's say we are not really #1 when it comes to logistics in this country.) So we decided to extend the conference with one day in Oslo before we board the ship on Thursday. Someone called it a pre-conference, which is unfair to the presenters since they are giving real meat tomorrow. Someone called it a whole-day conference, eh, as opposed to the other days? Anyway. tomorrow we'll have lots of hands-on labs, master classes and what I'm really excited about, RAC Attack.

Tonight we met at the top floor of the conference hotel as some kind of pre-conference beer meetup. I suspect the guys that showed up didn't really know they took part in a meetup, they just went to the nearest bar with the coolest view in the city. As always, it was nice to meet some of the invited guests: Maria Colgan, Christian Shay, Kuassi Mensah, Bryn Llewelyn, and Holger Friedrich, together with the rest and beers.

Some came with a late flight from UK, like the two Martins responsible for RAC Attack. Not sure where Doug is, he is not on tomorrow AFAIK, but he will be very welcome when he shows up. Btw, Maria told me they have the same humour in the presentations. I agree, those two can fool anyone into studying statistics.

More details on the conference here: http://ougn.no/program-2012. Let the party begin.