Days 10 and 11 were both spent in San Francisco. Unfortunately, days 10 and 11 were spent either in conference rooms or laying around feeling sick. (I took an exciting conference room photo, below.)
A Big Convention
The conference is good because it’s amazingly huge. Some 45,000 people are here in San Francisco to hear Oracle talk about the software it makes and how to use it to best effect.
I attended this conference last year. I don’t think it run quite as smoothly as last time. I do think the sessions I’ve attended are better than last year if only because I’ve encountered fewer product managers or had to hear them yip and yap about The Future while giving disclaimers that nothing they say is a promise.
Money to Travel
While walking around, I hear almost as many people speaking a non-English language as I hear English. This got me thinking, especially having just come from Paris where I was the non-French speaking person in the room. Such a number of foreign visitors got me thinking…
Oracle makes “Crazy Expensive and Absurdly Complicated” software that runs gigantic corporations. These are corporations that can send people thousands of miles for a conference. By my estimate, travel costs can easily tally to $1500 per person. Conference costs for the full-ticket are around $2000. Some companies send a dozen or more people to this conference.
The software on display here allows corporations to organize thousands of people and manage complex business relationships. Spending $100,000 or more on conference costs is justified because the software manages billions of dollars in transactions per year/month.
So when I think about it, this place is about money and power.
I’m not sure what to do with that thought, yet, but it seems meaningful.
San Francisco Photos
Because of the conference and because I am sick, the only photos I got this time in San Francisco were the ones I could take while moving between the hotel or conference buildings. So here they are, limited as they may be:
Epilogue I: a 50 hour day
There was one thing I had failed to do: go to a club. So on Saturday night, the last night I was in Paris, I went out in a pretty nice outfit I got in the city. I got there around 11:00pm and had planned to leave to catch the last Metro of the night. Of course, time moves swiftly and I missed the last Metro so stayed until they started running again the next morning at 5:30am. They serve drinks all night long, the music plays all night long and people come and go from the club all night long. It was a great way to celebrate my time in the city.
At 5:30am, I boarded the first Metro of the day to return to Montmartre. The platform was already busy with two kinds of people. There were the people like me who were finishing their night of celebration. Mixed in with us were the early morning workers, on the way to their shifts.
By 9am I was clean, sitting in the airport and writing this entry while I waited to check-in for my flight to California. (Yes, California.)
Epilogue II: too tired for this cra stuff
If you skip one night of sleep and go to bed at your normal time, you’ll be awake for 40 hours. If you then travel 9 time zones and have to stand in line to find out your luggage was searched by the TSA and will arrive a day later than you…and then you get a cab to the hotel…you might be awake for 50 hours.
And so, I had my first-ever 50 hour day.
The problem is that I can’t sleep on airplanes. If I could, I would have slept on the long flight from Paris to Houston where I connected to get to San Francisco. Alas, no sleep till San Francisco.
It was a frustrating grind of a trip.
- Snotty cab driver in Paris who wanted me to pay in cash when he said the credit card was OK.
- Long lines in Paris airport (CDG stinks).
- Long lines in Houston (TSA stinks).
- Baggage missing in SFO because it was searched at IAH (TSA
stinks sucks).
- Snotty cab driver in SFO who was angry I was going all the way into the city and not to some nearby hotel.
- Hotel manager who said my reservation was cancelled and they couldn’t put me up for the full conference…and that everyplace else in SFO is full.
(There are 45,000 people here for the Oracle conference.)
Epilogue III: Paris reflections
- Plan on taking the Metro. It’s very easy once you get the hang of the signs.
- Get a Metro pass (a day, a week, etc) because keeping track of individual tickets stinks.
- Check the web to find out when free Museum Sunday happens and plan for it.
- The Eiffel Tower is frickin’ huge.
- Expect cigarette smoke everyplace. You will stink if you go to a cafe.
- If you are a vegetarian, you’ll want to plan ahead. I’m sure vegetarian restaurants exist, but I didn’t look for them and none of the cafes had meat-free food, except dessert.
- The city is a mess. If you are a germ-o-phobe, maybe you should stay home.
- Attempting French first, even if you slaughter it, is better than asking if they speak English.
- Look both ways when you cross the street. Then look again and look as you cross.
