Hope you weren't planning on driving 1) to the Metreon, 2) to the Westfield mall, 3) to the W Hotel, or 4) to the Gold Club for the next eight days -- 800 pound gorilla Oracle has managed to convince the city of San Francisco that it is essential to the success of their Oracle OpenWorld convention that they entirely shut down Howard Street between Third and Fourth to traffic, because they need the space for their caterers. You're going to make caterers make canapes on the street, Larry Ellison?

Also, all the crosswalk lights have been extended an extra 10 seconds in all directions. Who knew you could pay the city to do that? We're going to take up a collection and see if we can get enough money to buy out one entire intersection (maybe California and Montgomery) for an entire day.

Oracle is expecting about 41,000 people to show up, and the mayor's office says that almost all the hotel rooms in town are booked. Funny, we found a bunch still open on hotels.com.

Howard Street closes at 8 p.m. tonight, and won't reopen until next Friday. Just take public transportation, folks!

The person on our site who works for Oracle and loves it there had nothing to do with the writing of this post. Neither did Steven T. Jones or Alix Rosenthal.