yapc day four: home from yapc
I haven’t written about day three yet. I’ll probably do that tomorrow.
I had some of John’s leftover pizza for breakfast. It was pretty good, and it’s been years since I had cold pizza for brekfast, so that was a bit of a treat. Once we were all up and ready, we shambled over to 7-11 and got a bit more food. We said our good-byes to the other attendees we saw and headed onto the el, bound for O’Hare.
The trip to the airport was really uneventful, which was pretty good: all previous events on the el had been unpleasant ones. There was one CTA worker on the blue line who struck up a conversation with us about the pay rates for the next round of NBA draft picks. We comiserated over the fact that even the last round picks were likely to earn far in excess of us.
Security at the airport got me fairly annoyed. First they made me take off my shoes, for no clear reason. There are usually signs that indicate that taking your shoes off may speed things along, but I don’t see how. I have to stop and take off my shoes, then put them on later. If it’s a requirement, they should just say so up front… and it would be a stupid requirement.
Worse, I had to put my soda in a bin, which then went through the x-ray. Of course it also got knocked around as they moved the bins back and forth so that, when I got it back and opened it, it fizzed everywhere and became flat and disgusting.
By the time we got to our gate, I was back to my normal mood and ready to relax while we waited. One of the pieces of YAPC swag was a card game called Campaign Secrets, in which each player is running for president. It’s pretty fun, although the rules need substantial tweaking and clarification. Once we’ve established Pobox House Rules, I will publish them.
Our trip home had a brief layover in Cleveland, where we stopped for burgers. They were adequate, but expensive. (What do you expect from airport food, anyway?)
We played another round of Campaign Secrets on the second flight, which led us to more radical and interesting ideas for house rules. We’d checked no baggage, so after getting off the plane we just wandered out to meet our rides. Jessica picked Dieter up, and Gloria got us just a few minutes later. The obnoxious heat and traffic had been irritating her, but getting onto the open road, listening to Bad Religion, and hearing some YAPC stories may have helped. I also sang “The Final Countdown” in falsetto, trying to explain an idea for a lightning talk.
We stopped at Tulum for some tacos and dropped John off at home. I picked up the copy of Windows XP that had been shipped to my dad (for me), and we came home to relax. Not too long after getting home, though, we lost power! That was probably around seven thirty, and it’s about ten, now. I’m really hoping we get power back before morning. My home server is still a single point of failure for mail exchange, and I’ve already had one outage this week, when my DSL went flaky.
The irony of this situation, given my current job is not lost on me. I’m going to fix this problem this week by finally getting my mail flowing through Pobox and to (code (simply))’s virtual server.
Anyway, having no power has been a good excuse to mostly just spend time hanging out with Gloria – although I did take the time to install XP and write this. Now, though, I’m going to bed and hoping for the best.