first few yapc days
On Saturday Gloria, Phil, Walt, Geoff, and I met up at Waffle House around eight o’clock and had some breakfast. Afterward, the men headed up toward Canada, and Gloria headed back to keep the home fires burning.
The drive up to Toronto wasn’t bad at all. We stopped for burgers on the way, and by strange coincidence ended up at the same Burger King at which we (thought a slightly different “we”) had stopped last year. We got to the hotel by around six and checked in. At the check-in counter, I was told that I only had a reservation for one day. Argh! Fortunately, though, it seemed to be mostly a problem with their ability to find my reservation, which did indeed exist. At any rate, we got the room.
Phil and I went out for dinner with David Allen, and it was good. I had bangers and mash, served with a really unusual spicy apple chutney. We walked around Toronto quite a bit (everything was closed already, at eight o’clock), considered seeing a movie, decided against it, and finally headed back to the hotel.
On Sunday, Phil and I got up and tried the hotel breakfast. It was immediately apparent that the continental breakfast was the lame sort, consisting of muffins and mediocre fruit, so we upgraded to the full breakfast buffet, which was also lame, but which included some meat and eggs. After that we headed out to find St. Michael’s, and then walked around Toronto for a few hours. I called Amex to get help finding a currency exchange, and the directed me to a nearby Amex Travel Services office which was, unfortunately, closed.
Around ten, we headed back to the hotel and took a quick nap before heading back out for Mass, picking up another attendee, Michael, along the way. The Mass was very nice. Much of it was sung, which was good – even if the senior boy’s choir was really more like a men’s choir. There were some little weirdnesses: they rang the bell too much, by mistake, I think; they said the Apostle’s Creed instead of the Nicene; the eucharistic ministers stood all around the perimeter of the cathedral. The cathedral itself was gorgeous, and had more candle-lined shrines than I have (I think) seen in one place before.
From there, we walked around some more, got lunch, and decided to see that movie we’d passed on, on Saturday. We saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and it was pretty darn enjoyable. After that, we had just about enough time to walk to the hotel and meet up with the posse heading out for the arrival dinner. We went to a Chinese place, where it took forever (over an hour) to get served; the food was alright, at least. The YAPC movie trip was after that, and although I hadn’t planned to go, I got sucked along by hide and two of his orkers. We sat Batman Beyond, which seemed much shorter, but equally good, the second time through.
Yesterday was the first day of YAPC itself. The talks I attended were alright, although they were mostly background noise. cog’s talk on obfuscation and golfing was a riot, though. I’m looking forward to having his slides on disk. There was a scavenger hunt, after the talks, but I skipped it and got dinner with some other folks. We had a good time, even though the bar in which we ate was killer hot.
When we got back, we sat around for a bit and talked, mostly about the scariness of various government agencies. I made a couple brief, expensive phone calls (seventy cents a minute on my cell!) because I didn’t realize I had a phone in my room that people could’ve called. Oops! Gloria and I did a little iChatting, which was fun. I love being able to talk “face to face” with Gloria when I’m away!
Finally, I crashed.
This morning I got up, showered, and had a nice little breakfast with Casey. As I type this, I’m in Abigail’s talk on Lexical::Attributes. Right now it’s all stuff I know, but I think it should get interesting toward the end. I think today will be better, talk-wise, in general. If not, maybe I’ll just get another nap in, or even get some hacking done, finally…