The much awaited Sun Tech Days in Manila was held in Shangri La Makati. I was looking forward to attending an organized conference but to my dismay, the event had its flaws especially with the registration part.
Registration was very disorganized. Getting IDs according to registration number was not done properly.
Lucky for me that I didn't get an ugly ID that has my name in pen. There were some who got ugly IDs because the event facilitator suggested to the event receptionists to slash out the names in the ID and replace them with the name of the current claimer so as to distribute IDs faster. That's not a very good idea, I'd say...
Ludwick and I arrived at Shangri La at 8:15AM but we weren't entitled to the early bird raffle because we got our IDs at 9:02AM. Disappointing, no chance to win an MP3 player. And to add, the breakfast served was cold hotdog sandwich and croissants. LOL. I'm okay with the breakfast but I think Ludwick had enough of the registration part and was cursing the event already.
There were four technical demos presented by the would-be speakers of the Tech Tracks at 4 minutes length each. The six speakers were divided into two groups and were moderated by Matt Thompson, keynote presentor. Angela and Sridhar were Team A while Sang, Casey (who had instant male Filipino fans) and Chuk, and Inyoung were team B. Team A presented more interesting demos so they definitely got more applause. Angela demoed on AutoID and wearable gadgets and Sridhar on Java Studio Creator. Angela was wearing these gadgets all over her body which really look funny. Matt held a foreign sign and Angela captured it with the camera in her forehead. Then she sent it to a web service that translated the sign as a ticket office. Neat!
Following the demos was an Oracle session on Service Oriented Architecture Web Services with Ragu as the speaker. He had this stiff Indian accent that was really hard to comprehend. If I were able to understand his accent it would have been an interesting presentation.
These were in the luncheon menu from the top of my memory:
Cream of Forest Mushroom Soup
Roast Chicken in Rosemary Sauce
Assorted Vegetable
Blueberry Cheesecake
Brewed coffee or tea
Day 2 (Nov 5)
I think cold breakfast is regularly served in hotels, hehe. We had cold tuna buns and I forgot the other one but they're both cold *laughs*.
There was a talent show where the prize was the Java leather jacket ($300 worth!!). The one who won the Java leather jacket was the one who showed the most creative talent among the 5 others. He swooshed the free Sun ballpen that emits blue light like a light saber and even gave it a complementary sound effect "wong". He even dragged it around and started doing sounds of a UFO. One of the participants even lifted Sang on her (yeah a girl who knows judo!) back.
Peter Zardrozny and Ragu Kodali did their second Oracle presentation. Ragu did a demo on Java Developer but somehow when he was copying a link from notepad he wasn’t able to paste it to a text field in Java Developer. He even tried cut, but still won’t work. Peter joked that it was Microsoft’s notepad’s fault!
Tech Tracks failed to interest me but I was most interested in the track about Portlets.
We had lunch with Sir Isip and other Mapuans. I can’t really remember the menu but it was something like potato soup, pork tenderloin, assorted vegetables and fruit salad.
I forgot to mention that there was this gimmick in the event where you have to let sponsors stamp on paper to collect points which are convertible to Sun money. Sun money will be used to purchase collectible items in the event. I accumulated a total of 600 Sun Pesos.
30 minutes prior to the opening of the Sun store, the event organizers were trying to divert people to go to the snack area where drinks are served. Unfortunately almost everyone were waiting for the store to open and despite repetitive diversion tactics (they kept on announcing about the drinks downstairs and that the store is not where we were waiting), almost no one believed them.
The Sun store opened at 5:30PM and there was stampede. This was actually the highlight of day 2. Everyone wanted their hands on the goods but unfortunately the event cannot provide all kinds of items for everyone. In fact they imposed the limit to two items per person. Items were very limited, to Ludwick’s dismay the yellow and black sports bag that he so wanted to purchase since Day 1 was not in stock already. So we were left to purchase small items. I was planning to go for the mouse in case the sports bag is not available, unfortunately its rate rose from 300 Sun pesos to 500 Sun pesos because it was limited to 30 stocks only. I went for the shirt and Duke stress ball because they're both the most genuine looking collectibles. These were the two items that were thrown during tech tracks and other sessions. Kokoy was lucky enough to have caught the Duke stress ball during a session so he got at least 3 items. I still have 250 Sun money left, how I wish they are convertible to cash. There were still items left- the ballpens and radio were not a favorite, I assume. They were just thrown out and everyone was desperately catching them.
The conference room was a mess afterwards. Ludwick and I just hang out at the lounge because Ludwick didn't feel on going home anytime sooner. Actually he was waiting for dinner hehe. Sashimi and cake for dinner is not so bad after all.
I'm kinda tired and somewhat satisfied (not really! No sports bag for me, jk!) when I got home and didn't even bother on reviewing for my two tests on Cisco. I just went straight to bed! BTW, when mom saw my Duke stressball, she thought it was a snow man—I always thought it was a tooth!!
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