Oracle Apex Notebook

San Francisco

Written by Paulo Vale on Sunday, September 21, 2008

I’m in San Francisco for the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 where I’ll be participating in one of the official sessions under the title “Building Commercial Software-as-a-Service Applications with Oracle Application Express”.

I’ve arrived yesterday around 6:30 PM after a tiring 18 hours long trip. I’ve started at Oporto Airport where I took a plain to Lisbon, then Philadelphia and finally San Francisco. As you can imagine, I’ve arrived completely exhausted.

It gets dark really soon in San Francisco. I took the BART to get to the city centre around 7 PM and it was completely dark outside.

After checking with the hotel, I took a short walk just to feel the city atmosphere and have a quick meal. The first impression I had was a nice, clean, organized, big city. Many people walking in the sidewalks, speaking numerous different languages. I’ve stopped some people to ask for directions and no one seemed to be from San Francisco… I guess San Francisco beyond an American city, it’s a World city. I’ve also noticed a bad thing: homeless people checking garbage cans and asking for money in the streets.

Today, the jetlag effect made me wake up at 2 AM. I forced myself to sleep a little bit more and managed to sleep until 5 AM. Considering that yesterday I woke up at 5:30 AM to start the travel and went to bed at 6:30 AM the next day (10:30 PM local time) I’ve been more than 24 h awake, excluding two or three small periods on the plain.

I have a full day with lots of sessions to follow and with the blogger meetup at the end of the day.

Keep checking this blog. I’ll try blog everyday during the OpenWorld.