From a nice trip to San Francisco. Most importantly it was to attend the OPP2007, but we got to do some sight-seeing as well. Of course there was the Golden Gate Bridge, Fishermans Warf, the boatride on the bay where we got to see the Golden Gate Bridge from a completely different perspective and of course a view of the Rock or Alcatraz. 

After the first full day in San Francisco, there was of course the OPP2007 which I blogged about earlier. It was fun to meet some people IRL. For instance, I met Philip Lambert, who did the Sudoku solver in PL/SQL. Of course, I also met Alex Nuijten from Amis. It had a good discussion with him on autonomous transactions. He had a nice way of building an wrapper around some code and then creating a helper package to this that could be different for every schema.

Then, friday, we had another day off on which we visited Oracle HeadQuarters. We had a nice lunch and talk with Mark Vilrokx there. Then we went up to the 16th floor of building 300 to admire the view. Afterthat, we went downstairs again to take a walk around the water in front of the Oracle buildings to go over to building 500. That is where Larry Ellison is supposed to be, but unfortunately he was already in the building, so we didn’t get a chance to say hi. After that we went on to Silicon Valley to see if we could visit Google. but it appeared that the don’t have a visitor center of any kind, so that was a bit of wasted time, but it was nice to see the building of the company.

On Saturday, one of my collegues, flew out to Houston to visit a friend of his, so there was just the four of us left to do some more sight-seeing, so we went over the Golden Gate Bridge again and had a bit of breakfast at Sausilito, at a small italian restaurant, while sitting in the sun at the bay. After this, we drove up to Redwood Forest. A nice reserve with really big and old trees. If I understood correctly, they wanted to build a dam and a lake where preserve is now. I am glad they didn’t. It also appears, that plant life has adjusted to seeing little or no sun, sometimes less than 10% of the time . It’s good to see how nature adopts to the circumstances.

After our visit to this preserve. we went up the mountain some more, to enjoy the view on San Francisco. After that we took the road down again to the beach,at the pacific ocean. Hey, I even walked into the ocean. It was only 1/2 inch, and I didn’t even get wet, except for my shoes.

After our visit to the beach, we went back to downtown San Francisco to walk around a bit. Check out some stores and of course see a cable car. While walkjing around town, I saw a crazy sight. The Apple store with a big advertisement for Windows Vista in front of it. Maybe Apple is hoping to sell more computers, now that they also support running Windows on your Intel-Mac. 

This post was written at an altitude of 10100 meters (33000ft).