The feared “demo-effect” – bluescreen just before our OOW session

Yesterday I arrived in San Francisco to attend and present on Oracle Open World 2008. After a really nice dinner with most of the ODTUG presenters, I quickly went to sleep. The day after -today as I’m writing this blog-, Lonneke and I were going to present the Oracle versus BEA shootout session in Moscone West. Exciting, moreover since the session was fully booked, with more than fifty people on the waiting list. So naturally we wanted to prepare, test, and fine-tune our demo’s this morning.

The day starts good. I had slept for more than 10 hours, my jetlag -that I really felt during the ODTUG dinner- was reduced to a minor disorientation. So far so good. I met with Lonneke to go over the demo’s. First thing that happens when I start my laptop is that I see the feared bluescreen of death telling me that a fatal core dump has occurred (sounds just like Star trek). Meanwhile the presentation was only a couple of hours away. Aarrrgghhh! To keep in Star trek terms, I only needed to realign the dilithium matrix to stabilize the warp field to fix this “coredump”. My laptop caught the demo-effect in its worst form: half our presentation is demo and my laptop is dead! That’s when my heart rate doubled and my blood pressure went to a new all-time high. Lonneke -normally making jokes to cheer you up when something goes wrong- kept quiet this time and looked at me alarmingly. Luckily, restarting computers when they’re broken or don’t do what you want can result in miracles: no bluescreen this time. Guess my computer had a jetlag too. After fixing our BEA demo’s and a quick rehearsal we left for Moscone. Luckily, the demo-virus stayed in the hotel and all demo’s worked perfectly during our presentation!

Later on this week we’ll post more on our Oracle Open World. We’ll also post the demo’s from our presentation later on.

Lonneke at OOW 2008.

Collect all the ribbons and become a fout-star general!