Most of this week I spend in San Francisco — I arrived on Wednesday with couple other Aussie Oracle ACE Directors, Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil. This year I have my whole family traveling with me so it should be fun.
The first few days we spent by sleeping off our jet lag and I was also working on my presentations for the Oracle Open World (I’ve got to do 5 sessions this year. I also managed to finish a chapter that I’m contributing for one book (and I was terribly late) so those couple days were very productive.
I’ve also managed to visit Oracle headquarters on Thursday and meet with few Oracle Enterprise Manager product managers as well as said hello to some of the “Russian mafia” at Oracle HQ. It’s always a pleasure to finally meet people face-to-face after knowing them online for a while.
Of course, I managed to snap a few pictures of Oracle HQ.
Full day on Friday was invested in Oracle ACE Directors briefing at Oracle HQ. While many think that there are many top secret things shared, I think it’s not entirely true. While we asked not to disclose most of the facts from the briefing, pretty much all of them are going to be announced at the OOW keynotes so make sure you stay tuned. Areas that were interesting to me the most are Oracle database, of course, and APEX 4.0. Business Intelligence was also quite interesting but it’s a bit far from my area of interests. Of course, all-things-fusion were flying way above me.
One of the best part of that day were post briefing cocktails to enjoy few with your fellow ACE Directors. The bus ride was also fun as we manager to grab few roadies with us. The bus driver seemed to be quite lost and those of us who new San Francisco pretty well were making fun on the poor guy.
We grabbed a quick dinner at Little Joe’s. They say on their web-site — “cheerfully serving quality meals at reasonable prices since 1970”. I could verify 3 facts out of four are true — cheerfully, quality, reasonable — but I haven’t been here in 1970 so we have to trust them. The highlight of the evening was meeting couple old friends in the pub if InterContinental Hotel — long time no see! By the way, InterContinental is a very nice place to stay I have to say.
We woke up late morning on Saturday and took a cab to Pier 39 for lunch and meeting three good old friends from Germany.
We had very nice lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf — seafood was awesome! We were excited about Fleet Week and see some cool sky tricks. This heavy guy was maneuvering very impressively for its size:
Blue Angels F-18 Navy Fleet was supposed to be the highlight of the event but I think they only did couple circles around in less than 10 minutes. Disappointed as I expected more but they were still impressive:
Sea Lions were fun to watch but boy do they stink!
I had to go back to the hotel early to prepare for my today’s presentation — I have lots of demos to do and I have only 1.5 hour instead of “normal” 2 hours that I need for that presentation. It’s Oracle RAC Workload Management session that needs some careful planning to fit even within 2 hours. Initially, I thought to records the demos to speed it up but then I tried to record it with my voice and thought that it wasn’t nice to run recording at the live session. I then thought that I could keep only the video and comment live — I tried but was struggling to either synchronise or keep pausing the playback. Finally, I decided to remove 3 out of 9 demos and do it live anyway. Let’s hope I fit on time because the last few demos are the most interesting.
I checked pre-registration status and there are 173 seats still available. It meens there must be more than a hundred pre-registrations as it should be at least 300 people room (Moscone West Level 2 Room 2001). Not bad for 8:30am Sunday morning session. Last year my session on Sunday was at more reasonable time and few hundred seats room was full. I noticed that RAC SIG session at 10:00am is in the same room so I won’t need to go anywhere and in the worst case I might overrun just a little bit assuming the audience stays awake.
Time to go — my session starts in 30 minutes. Wish me luck!
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