Best Presentation - ODTUG 2005

This week I have been at the ODTUG (link)Kaleidoscope 2006 conference at the Wardman Park hotel in Washington DC, and what a nice hotel it is. The reason I am here was to take part in the business intelligence summit that was organized by Oracle. My paper, The art of using calculations in Discoverer had been accepted by the ODTUG conference as one of the papers that would be included within the BI Summit (list of papers in summit). I presented my paper on Monday afternoon, the first afternoon of the conference, to a very attentive and receptive audience.

You can imagine my surprise when I arrived last Sunday to find that last year's paper, A first look at Discoverer 10g Release 2, had been nominated as one of the top 10 papers for the 2005 conference. Actually, the authors of the top 10 papers read like a who's who of the cream of Oracle presenters: Mike Ault (link), Bradley Brown (2 papers) (link), Don Burleson (2 papers) (link), Tony Catalano, Paul Dorsey (2 papers) and Steve Feuerstein (link). Then there was me.

Tuesday lunchtime came and the excitement had been building because the previous day the committee had said that they would be announcing the winners of the two coveted speaker awards - Best Speaker and Best Presentation, during lunch. I am delighted to be able to tell you that yours truly won the award for the best presentation with my old friend Tony Catalano, from TUSC, winning the award for the best speaker. We were both shocked because seeing the power of the authors that were against us we were convinced that we were there only to make up the numbers. My award, which incidentally is a rather beautiful black plaque with gold lettering, reads as follows:

Oracle Development Tools User Group
Best Presentation Content and Topic
Michael Armstrong-Smith
Armstrong-Smith Consulting
A First View of Discoverer 10g Release 2
ODTUG 2005
New Orleans, Lousiana

On Wednesday I will be delivering an encore of the winning presentation, a copy of which can be found on the download page of our main website (link). Some photographs were taken and just as soon as I am able to get my hands on one or two I will post here. As you can tell, I am thrilled to bits. It still hasn't 100% sunk in.

I have to say though that I would not have won this award without the help of my dear wife Darlene. She not only contributed to the paper but was the co-presenter of the presentation with me in New Orleans. So even though there is room for only one name on the award, it really was a team effort and she deserves as much credit for this award as I do. Thanks sweetheart, without you I would not be where I am today.