OOW 2010: Day 1

I don't know if it is Day 1 or Day 2, I'll leave that up to you.

I started out the day having a nice breakfast with Jake and John. Tomorrow hopefully I'll have a picture of how John eats his pancakes, including an awesome explanation of why he eats them the way he does.

John and I then headed down to Moscone North, the press/blogger area specifically. We figured we had to check out the accommodations. Not too shabby, it was nice and quiet with both power and a hardline. There seemed to be much more serious folks in there...in comparison with us anyway.

John finally left for his session, I can't remember what it was and then I left for mine, picking up Lewis Cunningham [blog|twitter] on the way.

My first (and only) session of the day was Implementing Oracle Exadata: An IBM DB2-to-Oracle Exadata Case Study. I'm in the midst of the same type of conversion and was hoping that I could pick up a few tips. Unfortunately for me, it was mostly surrounding Exadata, which I don't have much involvement with at this client.



But it was interesting...I had interviewed with LinkShare a few months ago, simply because I was trying to find a way to stay home more often. Things didn't work out for that particular job, which was OK as my current gig has lots of opportunities to learn.

I did have a session scheduled following that one, but I apparently went to the wrong place. Which makes perfect sense, since I didn't have my sherpa with me.

So I headed back to the press room where I got to talk to my family, which was nice. This is the longest I have been away from home, ever. Painful for all of us.

Next up I was planning to head on over to the OTN Lounge at the Mason Street tent to see Dan Norris speak about Exadata when I saw this tweet from Dan:



That made it super easy to head on over...it was 6:00 EST, so I was well within my rights to have a beer.

When I arrived, I found Dan and Justin in some nice studio setup at the "top" of the lounge (the lounge is a tent along Mason Street, naturally, but it's also a hill, which made it...interesting to navigate).



About that time I ran into Jake again, with his teammates in tow, Rich Manalang and Anthony Lai. I have been reading about them for a couple of years now, but had never gotten to meet them.

The 4 of us headed over to Puccinni and Pinetti to wait for John and our dinner reservation at Morton's. While there, Anthony commandeered my phone and decided to (semi)root it, I can now tether my phone! I think Anthony was a little nervous...he didn't want to break anything, but I had been having problems with the phone, so I let him do his thing.

When John finally showed up, we walked up to Morton's. A few hours later with great conversation and great food, we headed back to the Urban Tavern to meet up with Dan Norris. Jake's kidney hurt from multiple body blows, so he bowed out early, but not before I was able to catch this shot, the oraclenerd T-Shirt, v1 and v2:



Finally, Dan then spotted this wonderful scene:



At which point it was time to leave...

Tommorrow should be interesting, I'm on a quest to find this thing called Oracle ClosedWorld.