Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Yesterday was the first full day of the conference, and it went very well. Timo Elliott did his typical excellent job of opening the conference with a keynote full of possibilities. He remains very enthusiastic about the social aspects of BI, which is something that I think I agree is coming even if I’m not exactly sure when or how it is coming.

The second keynote was from Rubbermaid. They have done some interesting stuff with dashboards (which was fun to see) but one of the most impressive things to me was the statement that their company has at least one product in 90% of American households. That’s some serious market penetration.

I thought my talk went well. I had some great conversations afterwards about working with recursive data, including one interesting challenge related to investment funds. No, not a ponzi scheme, it’s a legitimate question. 🙂

The evening keynote was from Glenn Singleman. I had never heard of him, but he was an excellent story teller. He started out his career as a doctor in the emergency room. One day a co-worker asked him to go “canyoning” on the weekend, and when he asked what it was (and found out it involved hiking through deep canyons and the occasional descent over a waterfall) he was inclined to pass. A different co-worker then asked him to take his weekend shift so he could go, and Dr. Singleman decided that he would rather go hiking in wet canyons than work yet another night shift. The decision changed his life. He’s now an adventure documentary film maker along with being a doctor, and the adventures he has had…

He and his wife recently set a number of records by base jumping off of the highest cliff they could find, something over 6,000m (23,000 ft). From their web site:

On May 23rd, 2006 that strength and persistence prevailed, and they achieved their dream. Glenn and Heather successfully climbed Mt Meru in the Indian Himalaya and BASEjumped in wingsuits from a ledge at 6604 metres. It was a new world record, a world first for a woman and a husband and wife team.

And here I thought remodeling a house was the scariest thing a husband and wife could do together… 😆

Related Links

• BASEClimb.com