The Oracle

With our nation in crisis mode, I thought it was only prudent to suspend my blog through these difficult times. O.K., enough of that, I’m back.

I was driving home from an assignment the other day and for some reason I thought of Dan Quayle. Yeah, don’t ask me why, I have no explanation for that. Anyway, I’m assuming I thought of him because of the ongoing talk about Sarah Palin and how many think that she isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. So, I thought that it might be good to start calling her Sarah Quaylin. Alternatively, you could add an “E” to the end of Quaylin to commemorate the famous Dan Quayle “potatoe” gaffe.

It’s been a week of shooting technology leaders that have been speaking at the Oracle Open World conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Oracle convention is one of the bigger ones that comes to SF. They shut down a main thoroughfare to pitch huge tents for convention attendees to have lunch and occupy 3 huge halls of the Moscone Center. This year, Oracle has gone out of its way to promote the convention as a “green” event. One of the highlights was stationary bikes that you could hop on and charge your cell phone by pedaling for 15 minutes. The press release about the bikes made it sound like there was going to be several bikes that could possibly generate enough power to help power the convention. I thought that would be a fun thing to shoot as a “green’ feature, so I headed down to check it out.

Well, there were only 4 bikes that I could find. Then I had to wait for someone to get on one of them. I sat there for close to an hour. Some people would walk by (many of them overweight), look for a second, shake their head and move on. Grim.
With no takers on the bike front, I went for my second “green” option, the biodegradable food trays and utensils. All the food at the convention was served on trays made from plant material as was the water cups. The forks and knives were made from potatoes. There were people who would help you sort out your trash into the appropriate recycling bins. I met a “green team” member named John who appeared to be either homeless or part of a rehab program. I had been watching him for a while and noticed that after people would dump their trays into the bins he would take some of the leftovers for himself. He even offered me a brownie. I had to pass on that. One of the sides for the day’s lunch was a barley salad, which went untouched by most. John quipped “I guess people out here don’t care too much for barley” and with that he took a pinch and popped it in his mouth.

The keynotes over the next few days included Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel. Otellini is one of the most boring speakers on earth. It’s really tough to stay awake when he is on the mic. I would give anything to have Craig Barrett back, at least he was funny.
Mega-rich and eccentric Ellison is a weird dude. The guy is so full of himself. And what's up with that swarmy little beard he's got going? He opened his speech with a MTV style video of his new Oracle Trimaran racing boat. He then went on to talk about it in length. Does anyone care? Then he broke into the tech talk. I never have any idea what he is talking about. I’m not even sure what Oracle does. The tech talk is not only boring, but it is like listening to a foreign language. He went on to announce a joint effort with HP to produce some new server database thingy. It came out of the floor with fog machines going and dazzling light show. Don't ask me what it is or does. I had a hard enough time captioning the photos since it had two or three names.
People pay huge money to come to these conferences, I wonder what they get out of it.