I'm stuck in the Newark airport, since I missed the check-in for my flight by 5 minutes. Since I'm stuck here for another 2 hours until the next flight back to Austin, I've got nothing better to do than blog about my weekend. So here goes.
Friday:
My flight didn't get in until 10:30 PM, and I was still feeling pretty run down since I was ill, so that night was fairly low key. I went to some...Chinese? Mongolian?... restaurant with fearnor, asr, blll, winter, and uid0. Less than an hour later, dho, seisan, and poxy showed up, which was a good thing since I was getting pretty bored. All the NYNOG people are cool and all, but I can't hang when they are talking about networking stuff. I didn't have much to contribute to the conversation, so I ended up IRCing from my phone until everyone else came. After that, we had our own little "coders corner" at the end of the table.
It started getting late, and since the NYNOG people wanted to head up and do karaoke, dho and I went to crash at seisan & poxy's place. Unfortunately, we missed our train, so it took us bloody forever to get there. I think we finally ended up getting to sleep around some absurd hour like 5 AM. I've been told I fell asleep on dho's shoulder on the train. I do not remember this.
Highlight of the evening: Some drunk guy named Mike that was dressed up in what appeared to be toilet paper. I think he was supposed to be a mummy. He bought a pretzel off a sidewalk vendor, dropped it on the ground in a puddle, picked it up, and started eating it again. seisan called him on it. It was gross. He ended up on the same train as us. Listening to him and his friends was funny, or maybe we were just delirious from lack of sleep.
Saturday:
dho and I managed to struggle out of bed around 10 AM I think. Seisan was still out of it, so we called a cab, hopped a train, and made our way towards the conference. fearnor picked us up once we made it to the city, and we spent a while driving around Harlem trying to figure out wtf to go. Columbia University is like an oasis in the middle of the ghetto. It wasn't too horrible though - it just kinda reminded me of Atlanta.
When we got to the conference, I found out my registration hadn't been paid for (Thanks, Mike!), so I had to take care of that. The guys putting on NYCBSDCon told me that they had hella hits from my site. I'm rather curious as to how many people signed up after hearing about the conference here, though.
Alfred Perlstein (my spellchecker wanted to turn that into "Perl Stain" - heh) had an impromptu talk, "Captchas are LOL". That was awesome. Go zb.
I worked the FreeBSD booth for a while, which was kinda fun. I sold stuff, and the FreeBSD Foundation made money. Go donate to the project. No, really. Like, if all my readers donated $5, that would be cool. Do it now. Maybe then they can get a website that doesn't suck. Next year: a kissing booth. <3
I got to see a lot of friends that I hadn't seen in ages, and I recognized a lot of the people I met at BSDCan. Dan Langille was there, as well as Dru Lavigne - my two favorite Canadians.
After the conference, we all went to some local bar. Free food, decent music, and I got to hole up in a corner with a bunch of other BSD geeks dissecting FreeBSD on my MacBook Pro. It was awesome finally having someone else taking a look at what was going on. It kept quite a few people busy most of the night. It looks like I'm finally managing to drudge up some interest in this from other people. I don't remember exactly who I talked to, so if you're one of the cool people that sat there going through kernel code on my laptop all night, drop me a line.
asr was kind enough to let dho and I crash at his place that night. He has the thinkgeek /dev/blankie as well, and his is newer so it's much softer than mine. I am very jealous.
Highlight of the day: Jason Dixon's talk "BSD is Dying". By far the best presentation I have ever seen at any conference. 200+ slides in 20 minutes. But Jason, fuck you for that diss on Yahoo! :) REPRUHZENT.
Sunday:
asr decided to hit up the conference with us, so we got there probably around noon-ish. As Dan has figured out (and called me on, repeatedly), I can't get up on time for conferences. I'm lucky if I roll in by noon. Who the hell schedules a talk for 8 AM? wtf? We are not morning people. Adjust your conference schedules accordingly.
The only talk I managed to make it to that day was Murray Stokely's "Challenges that we face at Google". Murray is a cool guy and all, but I just wasn't in the mood for another "LOL DRINK THE GOOGLE KOOLAID" talk. Maybe I'm just feeling negative because they are teh enemy now. Yahoo! 4 Lyf. Speaking of, I got a bunch of shit from the Google booth. I walked in wearing my Yahoo! shirt with my Google hoodie. It's a war of search engines on my chest! Score.
RLoxley rolled down to see me, and I hadn't seen him in at least 6 years, so that was a trip. He still looks old. ;)
dho won Dru's book BSD Hacks during the closing ceremony raffle, but since he had 5 copies already (although by the end of the night, it had grown to 10...then 15 copies), he gave it to me. I got Dru to sign it for me. Very cool. I've been browsing through it, and it's got some good stuff in it. I'd recommend picking up a copy if you don't already have it. Even for the experienced BSD administrator, I guarantee you'll find something you didn't know about before.
fearnor, seisan, and poxy met asr, dho, and I at the end of the conference, and we went to some pizza place to get dinner. It was crappy pizza. I was not impressed. Where's this famous NY pizza I keep hearing about? Afterwords, we all rolled to pilosoft and had a little to drink. dho kicked everyone's ass at foosball. Is that how that's spelled? dho had to go home, so he gave me his beanie and left. Wee! New coder gear. We stopped by the village briefly. I got some cheapie sunglasses that make me look like a hella dork. There's a pic somewhere of me wearing the beanie with the sunglasses. I look horrible. I'll post it later.
asr and I made it back to his place relatively early - 11 PM or so. Since my flight was due to leave at 5 AM, I tried to get in a few hours of sleep. If I had known I was going to miss my flight by 5 friggin minutes, I would have slept in more.
Highlight of the evening: seisan stopped to pick up some shoes for me since my heels were killing me and we wanted to walk around. fearnor, poxy, and her were in one car, and asr, dho, and I were in the other. We were talking on the phone trying to meet up, and the cars pulled up right next to each other at the light. It took us a second to realize this, but we rolled our windows down, and seisan made the shoes handoff through the open windows right as the light turned green. That was some seriously shady looking shit. Best shoe handoff ever.
