YAPC 2006 Day 1 recap. Today was the first day for YAPC::NA
2006. I went to five different presentations today. Some of the talks, like the talk on
Sub::Exporter, and the talk on using AJAX with Perl were very informative.
I got a number of ideas from these talks, and I'm looking forward to playing
around with them to see what I can do. These are the kinds of talks that make
conferences like this useful. On the other hand, some of the talks were not so good. I had a number of
people ask me why I didn't give a talk this year. The reason was simple: I
didn't have anything new to say. Some of these talks that I go to are the same
thing year after year after year. And while I can appreciate that a lot of
the people that come to each YAPC are new and haven't heard the talks yet, I
think there has got to be a limit to how much repeat material goes into a
conference like this. Otherwise, the reasons to come back next year just
reduce with every year I go. Several of the talks I went to today seemed to revolve around the speaker
more than the subject they were speaking about. I really hate these talks.
It reminds me of politicians repeating popular thinking, like "crime is bad",
but not really providing any solution to the issues they are brining up. Tonight, I have some free time to sit back and relax. I'm going to try to
work on some Perl code tonight and get ready for tomorrow.
posted at: 21:13 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
YAPC Day one done.
posted at: 18:42 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Chicago
posted at: 14:33 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Andy
posted at: 13:37 | permanent link to this entry | Comments:
Arrival at Chicago It's 1:00 in the morning here, which is about 2:00 back home. It has been a
long day. Things started this morning before any of us were even at the airport. It
turns out that an earlier United Airlines flight to Chicago was canceled.
This left a lady with 17 kids that needed to get to Chicago so that they could
get on a flight to Poland stranded. So, United tried to cram all 18 of those
passengers onto our flight. Problem was our flight was already completely
booked. This, in turn, led to an extremely long line at the check-in, which was
exasperated by an under-staffed check in counter, including some new lady that
had no idea what she was doing. It took nearly 2 hours to get checked in. I
had planned on arriving at the airport at 3:00 for my 4:44 flight, it is a good
thing that I actually ended up getting there a half-hour early. Of the 5 of us flying to YAPC from Pittsburgh, three of us ended up getting
on the flight. I made it on the flight, but Andy, who was about 20 people
behind me in the check-in line did not. Joe and Andy ended up catching a later
flight, and arrived in Chicago around 10:00 in the evening. United did give
each of them a voucher for a free flight, and they also provided them with a
free meal. That was nice, but it would have been nicer if they hadn't screwed
up in the first place. With all the commotion with the boarding and people not getting on the
flight, we were actually about an hour late in taking off. Eventually we got
to a taxi and asked him to take us to the IIT campus. That's when we found
out that there isn't just one IIT campus. After checking some of our maps, we
thought we knew where we were going, and away we went. As we were nearing the campus, I'm certain I heard gunshots being fired.
And as we were getting out of the cab, the driver told us to be careful because
it was a very high crime neighborhood. Then, as the driver pulled away, we
discovered that he had taken us to the wrong spot. After walking around a
couple blocks, we discovered that our map was only about a block and a half
off, and fortunately it was a walk in the opposite direction of the gun
shots. The rooms themselves, as you can see from my
earlier post, are basically concrete. That includes the floor, walls, and
ceiling. The bed is a standard steel bunk with a mattress. These rooms are
very cold, and as it turns out, there is no thermostat in my room. Also, each
room apparently comes with only one thin blanket. When I asked for another
blanket for my room, I was told "we don't do that" I never thought we could
find rooms worse than last year's YAPC, but it appears I was wrong. After getting checked in, the extreme boredom began to set in. There
really isn't much to do around this campus. We found a Chinese restaurant not
too far away in a safe direction, so we decided to get some food there. Then
we came back and waited for Joe and Andy to arrive. I'm really hoping that tomorrow things will get better when there are more
people around. So far, this trip has been pretty lousy.
posted at: 02:12 | permanent link to this entry | Comments: