Like most days at these shows and my not-attending-shows life, the day started early and I was out of the room by 7am. The general session at 9:15 featured Aron Ralston, a canyoneer, whose real-life experience over a 127 hour period in April 2003 culminated in the triumph of the will to live and to love winning over a potential life-threatening accident. His story is the subject of a 2010 movie called 127 Hours, a gripping drama about Aron’s misfortune while climbing one day in the mountains of Utah. A boulder fell into a narrow passage and pinned his arm against the wall of the crevice. His story was a gripping and entertaining diversion from the tech-centric journey we were all beginning at COLLABORATE 13.
My sessions day started with Pythian’s own Maris Elsins and Yury Velikanov’s session #11792 in the OAUG forum discussing E-Business Suite in Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). The content demonstrated how Pythian navigated through the complexities and idiosyncracies of the ODA, offering to arrive at a successful migration. Being somewhat of a newbie to ODA, I found that the information presented was interesting.
I presented my pluggable database paper on Monday at 11am, and the room was half full with maybe 80-100 people. The show went well and I was pleased that Bryn Llewellyn from Oracle was in attendance as I was discussing a concept/feature in his area. There were a few questions, and I hope the attendees walked away from the room feeling confident that the session went well and that there were some container database concepts/management items covered as per the session abstract.
My next stop was lunch on the 16th street mall. I look ahead to conference lunches most of the time with trepidation (and fright) and usually end up eating off-site more days than not during conference attendance. This is not always the case, but often the meal of choice.
We marched back to the convention centre after my visit to an American institution called Walgreen’s for some cold medication. My next stop was Rene Antunez’s session discussing how to survive a disaster with RMAN. This was a treat and not only because this was Rene’s first session at a tier one conference. His delivery was fantastic and he could have fooled me… He seemed to be a seasoned conference presenter. Well done Mr. A. :)
Monday evening was the manifestation of what Canucks are supposed to do in the winter – watch hockey. We scored 6 seats for the Avalanche against the Flames at the Pepsi centre. Bonus! We met in the lobby of the Hyatt about 6pm and decided to hoof it to the game. It was a 20 minute walk and further than I has expected. Once there, we confidently rode the escalator and turned right to navigate to section 122. Our seats were great, about 10 rows up from the ice between the defender’s blue line and goaltender. We figured out the home team was in trouble when we only recognized one of their players: a goaltender named J.S. Giguere. The Avalanche lost 3-1. The arena food was as expected. We left the game to a light wet snow with the mercury around zero. The walk back to the hotel was again about 20 minutes and not long after turning onto a side street, we saw the Hyatt looming on the horizon. It seemed the more we walked the further the building appeared. With what seemed like a century later, we arrived home.
We coagulated in Todd’s room on the 35th floor as we had done the previous two nights. ‘Twas more early to bed than I had hoped.
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