Teradata Conference

We went with a couple of colleagues to a Teradata conference yesterday at the Louwman car museum in Raamsdonksveer. In case you don’t know (and most of you probably don’t), Teradata is a company that provides data warehousing solutions. It was pretty interesting. I especially liked the first presentation by Stephen Brobst, the CTO of Teradata, and apparently the guru in the field of data warehousing. Btw, Teradata kicks Oracle’s ass (probably something only a nerd would say).

The second presentation, by Dave Schrader (If I remember correctly, he was head of the marketing department. I could Google him of course, but I feel a bit lazy right now), was less interesting in my opinion, since it mainly just involved some case studies, but without really going into the processes. I thought I might have detected a Minnesotan accent, though I’m not entirely sure. It’s just that the way he talked somehow reminded me a lot of HeeRa.

The third presentation by the SNS Bank was pretty poor. The speaker sounded really unsure about what he was saying, and to be honest, I was expecting something more spectacular based on the title (“Towards a single version of the truth” or something like that).

After the presentations, we got a (very quick) tour of the museum. I normally don’t like cars, but even I thought it was pretty cool. There were cars from the 19th century (according to the guide, they actually still work), up to an original Aston Martin from a James Bond movie and a car owned by Elvis, with lots of special cars in between. If you like classic cars, then you owe yourself a visit to the museum.

Crawling back into my shell

I had a training on Thursday and Friday called “Projectmatig werken”, which basically just means working in a project-oriented way. For me personally, the goal was to learn how to work in a more structured way. It was a good training, with a lot of variety, so it never became boring. And I think there were some very good pointers, but the question still remains if I would actually apply them to my work.

What worried and surprised me though, was how passive I was, and how uncomfortable I felt during most of the training. I thought that I would have more confidence by now, but apparently, you can just drop me in a room full of strangers, and I’ll fall back into my bad habits in a heartbeat. The exercises we had to do in smaller groups went a lot better, apart from the first one. I felt more comfortable and less self-aware during those sessions.

I’ve been staying home a lot lately. I was starting to get exhausted of all the social activities, and of being around other people. I just felt I needed some time all alone. I even had to force myself to get out and do my groceries today! I think it also affects my work (and come to think of it, it might have affected my behavior during the training as well). I really don’t feel like working at all during the past two weeks. There were days before when I didn’t feel like working as well, but they usually only last for 1 or 2 days. Let’s hope I can get some of my energy and enthusiasm back by spending some time all by myself.