Yesterday morning my co-worker, Alex Gorbachev, arrived from Sydney. We went together to sight-see around the city. First stop was across the street to the IGA to buy a bus pass…sold out ..across the street again ( kitty corner from hotel) to the “Southern Cross Station”. It is a really big train station and used to be called “Spencer Station” because it is on Spencer St.
We stopped off and got a map of Melbourne and made our way to Bourke Street for lunch. It is an area of town like Sparks Street in Ottawa that is closed off from regular traffic, open only to pedestrians and “the tram”. After lunch we caught the tram ( only one stop ) just for the sake of catching it. We walked through Confederaton square, which was interesting only for the unusual buildings and then took the alley to the canal and finally to the park.
Next we headed to the large cathedral. It was HUGE and glorious and open to the public. It was breath-taking in it’s beauty and architecture. While there, both Alex and myself, made a contribution to the candle fund and lit a candle. After having “no joy” ( no luck) finding the other churches in the area ( both were small and closed), we got on the tram system and headed to the botanical gardens.
The gardens were absolutely gorgeous. It was smaller than the map let on and we managed to do the entire park. At first, I thought we would have to skip parts of it…but we managed to see the entire park. On the last side path we did, I somehow lost my footing and tripped and scraped my other knee. So if ‘Australia does not kill me, it is certainly going to get me in really good shape. We left the hotel by noon and did not get back until nearly 6:30. Even with the few stops for lunch and coffee and tram rides, I musta walked for hours and hours !!!
We went to China town for dinner last night, where Alex had real ( and real hot ) chinese food. A combination pot of some sort. He did not look too healthy while eating it. I admire his tenacity for managing to eat it all. It was far too hot and spicy for me.
Today was day one of AUSOUG in Melbourne. The first session I attended was Penny Cookson’s session on Oracle 11g. It is the same one she gave in Perth and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to go again. After I went to Chris Muir session on load testing APEX and JDeveloper. It was very interesting and he demonstrated the tools for capturing and replaying sets of data. The whole process is much simpler than I thought it would be.
In the afternoon, I attended Penny Cookson’s sesson on APEX, followed by Tony Jambu’s session on Histograms. I presented in the 4pm timeslot today, but having my luggage this time, I was much better prepared. I brought the famous “easy button” and used it to make the presentation on LDAP and Oracle Application Server easy. Hopefully by the end of it all, the participants could say “that was easy” !!
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