Knowing myself, I doubt it will end up quite like this, but I thought I’d throw together an approximation. (I must say, the schedule builder this year is a significant improvement on previous years. It doesn’t have a jet-lag adjustor, but you can’t have everything.)
Sunday, Sep 21
10:00-11:30 Building an Oracle Real Application Clusters Environment on VMWare for Free (IOUG)
13:00-14:30 Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware (IOUG)
16:00-17:30 Storage: A New Paradigm for Databases (IOUG)
19:00 - ? Blogger Meet-up
Monday, Sep 22
11:30-12:30 Undocumented Oracle DBA Utilities: Black Magic for the Oracle Expert
13:00-14:00 Simple Tips to Quickly Find Answers to Your Oracle-Related Questions and Keep Your Oracle Skills Up to Date
14:30-15:30 Oracle Real Application Clusters SIG: Oracle Grid Expert Panel
16:00-17:00 Go Behind the Scenes of Oracle’s On Demand Data Centers and Global Operations
19:30-23:00 OTN Night
Tuesday, Sep 23
09:00-10:00 Inside Oracle Database 11g Optimizer: Removing the Mystery
11:30-12:30 Advanced Performance Diagnostics: What the GUI Doesn’t Tell You
13:00-14:00 Current Trends in Real-World Database Performance
17:00-18:00 Top 10 Things You Wanted to Know About Automatic Storage Management but Were Afraid to Ask
Wednesday, Sep 24
09:00-10:00 Keep Auditors Happy for Both Oracle Database and SQL Server with Oracle Audit Vault
11:30-12:30 Time-Travel Through Your Data with Oracle Total Recall
12:00-13:30 OTN Lounge - ACE Office Hours
13:00-14:00 SQL Tuning Roundtable with the Experts
20:00-00:00 Appreciation Event*
Thursday, Sep 25
09:00-10:00 Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting: No Magic Is Needed–A Systematic Approach Will Do
10:30-11:30 Oracle ACE Director Birds-of-a-Feather Tips and Techniques Panel
12:00-13:00 Real-World Database Performance Techniques and Methods
13:30-14:30 Real-World Database Performance Roundtable
There are all sorts of reasons behind these choices. Some are about
products I’m interested in, some are panel sessions (in which I often
enjoy the questions as much as the answers) and some are because I know
the presenters are good. You’ll notice a distinct lack of Web 2.0 or
‘Futures’ presentations, though 
I’m an incorrigible dinosaur.
I’m also hoping to be a bit more involved personally this year. First, there are the Oracle ACE ‘Office Hours’ mentioned by Tim Hall in his blog. The ACE organisers sent out an email suggesting that it might be best to have pre-set times for ACEs to hang around the OTN lounge in case anyone actually wanted to talk to them (about Oracle stuff, presumably). Well, by the time I’d got there, the one slot that seemed to fit in with my plans was already occupied by various Oracle performance experts but I reckon I might learn something by hanging around anyway It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
Second, I’m thinking about presenting at the Unconference, but I’m not sure yet. There are a couple of existing presentations that might fit the mood and tone of an Unconference but, like last year, I might hang fire to see if new faces step forward first.
* Scoop! Elvis Costello - could be worse. UB40 could even be alright if they were the band I liked as a teenager, but I expect it’ll be a greatest hits set 