Innovation Nation Shakes IT Up
Boy, the conference planners here must have some pull in high places, because they got a 5.9 earthquake to help them with their “Shake IT Up” slogan for Innovation Nation and GOSCON. I was in the upstairs conference hall, and it was pretty dramatic. I’ve never seen/felt/experienced anything quite like that before. All the walls were twisting and shimmying in different directions, and fixtures fell out of the ceiling. Just little ones — but I decided not to rush to the exit, as I was in a huge room and others were already rushing. I figured the odds of getting hurt in the rush were more than the odds of the building collapsing. But I did look upwards to see if I was going to get bonked on the head by a falling light fixture. High ceiling; time enough to dodge if I was lucky.
I met Keith Larson, Craig Sylvester, and several others whose names I’ll get wrong or misspell in the expo hall at the Oracle MySQL booth. I’m staying tomorrow for the Oracle MySQL seminar (thanks Oracle for this free event!) and will report on that afterwards.
Good to know you guys are OK. That quake is a good one even by local standards out here in California.
Robert Hodges
23 Aug 11 at 8:02 pm
Yeah, I never thought good old Virginia was gonna get one like that. It’s not very far from where I live, and even closer to the Lake Anna nuclear power station. After reading more about it, it looks like we have a pretty decent seismic zone here. I was in my car driving during the 2003 event, so I never felt that one.
Xaprb
24 Aug 11 at 7:45 am
There’s a video of the panel speakers and their reaction to the quake: http://www.meritalk.com/video.php?user=SteveOKeeffe&video_id=157
Too bad it’s zoomed in so far that you can’t see the walls swaying. I wonder if that really happened, or if it was just my experience of it? It would be fascinating to see a video and compare my memory to the truth.
Xaprb
26 Aug 11 at 9:00 am