ArchBeat

After a few days recuperation the cumulative effects of minor jet lag, three days straight manning the info booth in the OTN Lounge, the massive OTN Night shindig, the ACE dinner, and various other cocktail-fueled encounters with colleagues old and new, I feel sufficiently restored to acknowledge a few of the smart, funny, interesting people I met as part of my OOW08 experience, most of whom are Oracle ACEs or ACE Directors. 

That experience began on Sunday night (9/21) with the Oracle Blogger Meet-up, at a place called the Thirsty-Bear, just steps from Moscone Center.  Working, as I do, in the hermit-like conditions of my home office, it was a genuine pleasure to have face-to-face conversations with real people while consuming adult beverages and watching Flamenco dancers.  Any two of those things would have been cool. All three together was a bonanza (which, I believe, is the Spanish word for "bonanza.") Ole!

Among the people I met at the meet-up were event organizer and uber-blogger Eddie Awad, Dan "Da Man" Norris, and Hans Forbrich. Eddie was busy playing host, and doing a bang-up job, but that meant we didn't get much of a chance to talk. Hans and I had a great conversation about the role of the software architect and the qualifications for that role. Some of that conversation explored the idea that allowing just anyone to claim the title "software architect" is perhaps as wise as allowing just anyone to claim the title "airline pilot."  I didn't really get a chance to talk to Dan until the ACE Dinner on Tuesday.  More on that in a moment.

Bright and early Monday morning I reported to the OTN Lounge, where I spent the next three days downing shots of espresso, scanning badges, and responding to questions like "Where are the t-shirts?" and "Do you have any t-shirts?" and "Can I get a t-shirt?" A few people had a difficult time grasping the "Lounge" concept and had to be convinced that they could come in and, if they so chose, do absolutely nothing. Most had no such problem, and the OTN Lounge got quite crowded immediately after each keynote, and especially when the beer arrived each day at 4pm, just ahead of the daily drawing for an iPod Touch.

The lounge was so busy on Monday afternoon that I was unable to get away to attend Bex Huff's Unconference presentation on Enterprise 2.0.  I'll have to make do with the deck Bex posted on Slideshare.

Bex's wide-ranging blog is one of my favorites in the OTN community, and I was glad to have a brief chance to talk with him when he stopped by the info desk, along with former BEA Dev2Dev/Arch2Arch blogger Chris Bucchere.

Jake Kuramoto from AppsLab happened along at that moment, passing out AppsLab stickers and offering  a very gracious response to questions from Chris and myself about getting rid of duplicate Oracle Mix accounts. 

On Tuesday Floyd Teter dropped in. Floyd is yet another of my favorite OTN community bloggers. He and I have communicated very briefly via Twitter, and I've left comments on his blog, so it was great to get some face time with him.  The conversation continued later when Floyd and I ran into each other again on the way to the ACE dinner at Le Charm. Floyd's a good dude.

At the ACE Dinner I sat with OTN colleagues Mark Panozzo,  Linda Bronson, and Lawrence Leung. We shared a very lively table with ACEs Dan Norris and Chris Ostrowski.  Dan was unfazed by the good-natured yet relentless ribbing he had been taking from the other ACEs for having been mentioned in one of the keynotes. Earlier in the day, Dan, who was already sporting a pimped-out conference badge that ended just below his belt buckle, joked that he wanted to add one more item on the bottom of the stack that carried the message "My eyes are up here!"

After several appetizers and glasses of wine, the already loopy table conversation turned to Mogens Norgaard's infamous Unconventional Oracle Installation videos, in which a man wearing a straightjacket installs Oracle Database with his nose. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the conversation would eventually get to the even more infamous yet somewhat less instructive video in which Mogens goes commando in his office.

While manning the OTN Lounge info desk on Wednesday I met Mauricio Naranjo, who hails, as I recall, from El Salvador (his ACE profile lists Colombia) and will soon launch an English-language version of his blog. Being a resident of soon-to-be-chilly Cleveland, Ohio, I couldn't help but compare notes on climate with Mauricio. How sad that he lives in a climate in which winter and summer are indistinguishable, and the weather can change without warning from warm and sunny to sunny and warm. And that climate has apparently affected Mauricio's personality. He is so relaxed, affable, and pleasant that I had to have several more espressos just to restore my Rust Belt anxiety.

The fact that I had been trying to match names I hadn't memorized to faces I had only seen in tiny online photos is probably why I mistook Chris Muir, whom I did not get a chance to meet, with Lucas Jellema. And the fact that I did not study the ACE profiles is probably why I was about three countries off when my conversation with Lucas turned somehow to geography and hometowns and I tried to guess where he was from. (The correct answer, for those scoring at home, is The Netherlands.)

There were many others, of course, but to mention them all here would tax the patience you have already exhibited by reading this far. Suffice it to say that my first live encounter with Oracle ACEs was rewarding, entertaining, and then some, and I'm looking forward to meeting more of them.