Tomorrow I leave for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

This year, for the first time, there isn’t an Apache track, and my tutorial is in the Javascript/AJAX track. Ok, a little weird, but I guess I can live with that. There’s also a Web Apps track, where some of the other stuff traditionally categorized as “Apache” has been placed.

I wonder if Apache, or web infrastructure stuff in general, is just not selling seats anymore. Or perhaps we (the ASF) confused things by insisting that “Apache != httpd”. Which, while true, also encourages people to come up with alternate naming for stuff, and thus make Apache (the web server) less visible.

I’m in the Portland airport (which has free wireless, as all airports should) and heading home. I’m very very tired.

I came to the airport in the early afternoon, because the nice lady on the phone suggested that if I came to the airport, there was a good chance that I could get my flight moved earlier. This turns out to be not true at all. So, I checked my suitcase, and got back on the Max to go back to the hotel and hang out with Ken. I also realized, shortly after checking my suitcase, that I still had my Gerber on my belt. So I’ve given it to Ken, and he’ll hopefully return it next weekend.

So now it is 10pm, and I’m about to get on the flight. Then I get to spend 5am until about 7am in the O’Hare airport. Joy.

I am very ready to not be travelling any more. But I still have one more trip this month, for the ApacheCon planners meeting. At least I have a few days to enjoy my new home before I have to leave it again.

As usual, once the conference starts in earnest, I have fallen behind on blogging about it. So here’s a summary of some of the high points.

Wednesday morning, there were a variety of interesting keynotes, but the one that was the most interesting was Kim Polese talking about the transition from geekdom as a diy (do it yourself) to dit (do it together) culture. Very interesting observations.

The interview with Jon Schwartz was also very interesting.

I attended John Coggeshalls talk on php5, which was somewhat helpful. I knew many of the things he talked about, but I was curious as to whether there were new features in php5 that I wasn’t yet aware of.

I also attended Rasmus’ talk about the state of PHP. Unfortunately, he covered almost exactly the same material that John covered.

Somewhere in there I attended Damian Conway’s talk, which was, as always, entertaining, although the contents likely won’t be immediately useful to me.

The evening event was “70 Proof” – a 70’s band who played absurdly loudly. At one point, the lights went out briefly, and the singer, at the end of the song, observed “when the lights went out there, it was almost like a real rock concert!” Yeah. Almost. 😉

After being up too late, it was pretty hard to get up this morning to get to the keynotes, but I’m glad I did.

Dick Hardt’s talk about Identity2.0 was fascinating. We need a “universal id card” for the web.

But the winner of the morning was Robert Lang, speaking about computational origami. He showed how an arbitrary shape can be computationally turned into a piece of origami. It was *amazing* the things that he had made out of a single piece of paper without any cuts.

I gave my “Why I Hate Apache” lightning talk again. It was received less exuberantly than in Stuttgart, but it was still well received, and a lot of fun to give.

And this afternoon I gave my mod_rewrite talk. I ran a little long, but there were good questions, and I fell like it went well. There are some things that I need to tweak if I give this again. Unfortunately, the talks here are 45 minutes, rather than the 50 or 55 that I usually expect, and I was just about that close to the limit. But this left no time for questions at the end.

I had a very well-attended tutorial, and they had good questions. Over all, I’m very pleased with how it went. Now I get to enjoy the rest of the conference, except for a 1-hour talk on Thursday. That’s a new talk that I haven’t given before, but I’m not particularly concerned.

Time to find other like-minded geeks to hang out with.

Or maybe I’ll go geocaching.

I arrived in Portland around 10:30 last night, and took the light rail to the hotel, where there was no reservation for me. Now, I’m certain I sent the email saying, yes, I wanted the hotel room. And I’m *very* certain that the folks at O’Reilly didn’t screw it up. In all the years I’ve been attending O’Reilly conferences, I’ve been very very impressed with how the handle things, and particularly at how they take care of their speakers. So I can only assume that the Red Lion just decided not to book my room, for some inscrutable Red Leonine reason.

Fortunately, they had one room available last night. And I’m confident that Vee can straighten things out. She seems to have a knack for straightening things out.

The clock in my hotel room was off by an hour, so I got to the convention center at 6:3o instead of 7:30. Better early than late.

So, here I sit, in the dark, in my presentation room, waiting for the knowledge-hungry hordes to arrive. I have an ENORMOUS room, which is always a little disconcerting. Particularly since nobody’s here yet.

Once again I’m in the Bluegrass Airport, on the free wireless network.

For the record, *ALL* airports should have free wireless. It’s about the only thing that makes this airport tolerable. Or any airport, for that matter.

I am *so* tired of travelling. I am so tired of airports. Tired of the TSA. Tired of ear-bleedingly-loud PA systems begging for my attention and telling me that security is everyone’s job.

I’m telling you, one of these days, I’m actually going to report the “suspicious” looking people, and it’ll bring things to a grinding halt. That guy over there is wearing a Beatles T-shirt. That must be suspicious. And that group over there is sitting around on the floor *praying*! They must be fanatics.

And that guy sitting over there with the loptop has an open file share with confidential business documents in it. Clearly suspicious.

*sigh*

As much as I enjoy OSCon, I’m really not looking forward to this one. I wonder if I can wrangle an earlier flight home.