MOOW 2K7 – The drive home, Come Home- Event (Thursday)

Thursday morning, somewhere between 11.00 and 11.03 hours, the Miracle Express left from Anjo Kolk’s home. From the almost 40 Dutch participants of Miracle (Oracle) Open World event, 12 / 13 of us Dutchies went with the Miracle Express, recognizable on the new commercial red and black stickers (with the name “Miracle Express”) on the side of the Miracle bus and a big Ford Galaxy. After a 7 hours drive, with small pit stop somewhere in Germany, we arrived in the Lalandia resort, Rødby, Denmark.

We got a warm welcome from our Miracle hosts and after small sidestep, dropping our luggage in our cottages; we met again in the Lalandia Center to enjoy the welcome speech from Mogens Nørgaard. As told by Alex Gorbachev. Mogens started off with discussing the difference of Miracle (“Oracle”, not “SQL Server”, maybe something for the future) Open World comparing it with other Events. Especially the 80% – 80% (social : technical) setting, compared to others, 20% – 80% (social : technical) should make the Miracle difference (and I would feel this the next days…) and the why Miracle Open World is so special.

I have a lot to learn, because only the first day I could uphold the mentioned, first “80%”. Towards the end of the Miracle Event it slipped back to the standard 20% (the øl part included).

Mogens really got into it starting comparing, on different levels, Miracle Open World versus (among others) Oracle Open World. With lots of humor he also gave everyone the advice to “Come Home” when left alone in the dark or getting un-employed. The Miracle “Come Home” incentive would take care of all the lost Oracle souls out there. So if you’re lost, have a call with Miracle and “Come Home”.

Cary Millsap was asked to start a small introduction towards the technical session. Although unprepared (at the end of the evening we then knew it was a set-up introducing Michael Möller), Cary started off bravely and somewhere in between his story the question rose, from the audience, if he could explain how he managed, in his childhood, to “blow-up box turtles” and if he knew that this species (maybe some of this his doing) was now an endangered one. At the time I didn’t know what a “box turtle” was, but apparently I guessed right, checking it up on the Internet, 3 days after the event. The fact is though that I still don’t know how someone can blow up a box turtle (Cary being a boy? Without applying brutal force, like using dynamite and stuff?).

Michael then started his (very humorous) session about High Availability measures and how to be prepared (or not to be prepared for or…). Everything he did caused something else to be triggered causing failure of his presentation. The presentation slides were up side down, his laptop battery failed, printouts of his presentation were incomplete and he was unable to use the whiteboard, because just before, Cary was tricked during his introduction to use a water resistant marker for his drawing on the same whiteboard, etc. etc. Whatever he tried to do to make his presentation work, everything failed, every fallback scenario ended up to be unusable. This way he created awareness for the fact that one should be prepared for the unthinkable when dealing with the topic “High Availability”.

This concluded the technical session and we were invited to join the social event at cottage L142 where some Danish specialties would be presented (mainly øl stuff).

The next day the sessions would start…

(“Come Home, Come Home, Come Home…Lala..Landia”)