Monday started with the San Francisco bay swim. I was actually pretty scared about doing this. I like to swim, but I’m a child of the “Jaws” generation, so open water is not my thing! Added to that, the water is cold. The coldest my training pool ever gets is 25 degrees C, which feels quite cold. The water in the bay is unseasonably warm at 19 degrees C. For anyone that doesn’t know, that means it is damn cold!
Some brave souls ran and dived in. Rather than risk a heart attack, I walked in. 🙂 After the initial shock I figured I better actually swim or die. Once I got moving, it was a lot better. Having never done any open water swimming, I found it quite difficult to keep my face down in the water. On the few occasions I did, I thought I saw dark shapes in the water with me and started to panic! I didn’t swim too far. It was only a couple of hundred metres, but by that time nearly everyone else had got out. It was more of a “bay dip” than “bay swim”. 🙂
From there is was back to the hotel to get cleaned up. I then headed down to the conference to hit the demo grounds. Being part of the ACE Director briefing means we’ve heard most of the important announcements already, so it can sometimes be hard to find sessions to watch. The demo grounds are a different thing entirely. There is always something interesting that can be gleaned from the staff manning the demo booths.
From there is was on to a hands-on session on the new JSON features of 12.1.0.2 with Mark Drake and some of the development team. The hands-on labs are a very quick way to get a feel for the subject. I think the JSON support will probably be the next article I write. Hopefully, I’m also on to the beta program for the REST API support for this JSON stuff too. Fingers crossed.
I kind-of ducked out of all evening commitments and spent the evening in my room. There was lots of cool things to do,
