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Live From Austin

Posted on October 12, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out, Vacation, Drama

The flight down was long. I arrived at YVR an hour and a half early, only to have my flight delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms in Dallas. Fortunately, my connecting flight to Austin was also moved an hour, otherwise i would have missed it. I made the connection OK thanks to this light rail system they have at the airport. I’m more worried about my connecting flight home; I probably have 15 minutes or less to go between gates.

On the long flight, i wrote a C program to solve “medium” sudoku puzzles using heuristic scanning and counting — which made the flight seem a little shorter. “Hard” puzzles, according to Wikipedia, requires bifurcation/guess-and-check. I digress…

The Coastal and Rocky moutains were amazing from above; it’s the first time i’ve been over them. The air above was so clear it was shaded blackish-blue instead of whiteish-blue that we’re used to. Would have been able to see Great Salt Lake too if not for cloud cover. Approaching Dallas, there was this neat diffusion/defraction effect around the shadow of the airplane which looked like a circular rainbow. Laura was bugging me to take the camera, and now i wish i had for that stuff =).

Austin itself seems fairly “normal”. By that, i mean it looks a lot like Victoria but in a hot climate where lots of people speak Spanish. There’s lots of old “heritage” buildings, brick crosswalks and roads, and slummy-but-nice suburbs that remind me of Langford. It’s really, really, humid here. The temperature outside the hotel has been hovering around 25C. At night, you can see the moonlight towers clearly in the distance from my hotel room. They give off this lime-green-ish light, which makes them look very UFO like.

The most noticeable thing, IMHO, about Austin is that the water tastes and smells like mud (which i can taste in the food). It’s probably due to the Colorado river being the main source (either that, or it’s aquifer water; i’m not certain, but both could result in heavy mineralization).

The opening Keynote talk was this crazy physicist guy that showed the crowd how to measure the speed of light. If you can imagine a crazy scientist, this guy is that archetype. He has this strange quirk: he’d randomly pause to complain that he’d run out of chocolate milk (when he wasn’t busy running around the room). As for the content, it was really interesting — especially since it has absolutely no relevance to the conference itself.

As for the reason i’m here (my talk)… i’m not happy with how it went, especially since the events leading up to it were rough.

For dinner the night before, i had a “fancy” steak with a big glass of red wine. The steak was good, but the wine was a big mistake — it hit me like a brick, probably from being tired from the long trip. I spent the next few hours trying desperately to sober up without resorting to caffiene (which keeps me up all night, regardless of offsetting alcohol consumption). I was up until 3AM CDT going over the slides and had to wake up at 6:30AM. Ugh.

After getting up and registering, I had to run to a store a few blocks away to buy a cheap watch so i could time myself. I then spent an hour before lunch talking-out the slides in my room, which made my voice hoarse. Fortunately that cleared before i had to give the actual talk, but it just added to the overall stress.

45 minutes before the talk, the room was free so i started hooking up the laptop to the projector. No matter what I did, i couldn’t get Linux/Xorg to work with the dammed projector! It would show my desktop colors, but it was totally garbage and you couldn’t read anything. I had expected this, so i said to myself “no problem! i’ve got the PDF on my fancy new laser-pointer-USB-key here, i’ll just boot into windows!” Windows worked fine with the projector, but i had neglected to install Acrobat Reader. Furthermore, the wireless card refused to associate with the access point in the same room. Argh! I ended up having to borrow the chairperson’s macbook (chairperson = person from the ASF that introduces me and, i think, rates the talk). The PDF loaded fine,but then we notice there’s only a DVI port on the macbook! Fortunately, Gozer (ActiveState mod_perl guy) had a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and i was able to talk.

The talk went too fast; I wasn’t feeling nervous, but I didn’t manage the pace very well (skipped over too much detail when I didn’t need to). There was fairly low attendance; I counted about 25 people at the start, but only 2 people left during the talk (including one developer that I was hoping would ask questions at the end). Overall, i feel that i did a substandard job. All of the other talks that i’ve been to were definitely better content-wise, but there’s been at least one other speaker down at my level. Anyway, i’m not letting it get me down too much… i know now that i need more practice and need to dedicate more time to the process of creating a talk.

After the talk, i went to a few more sessions, had a few beer at this social event, then went to bed early =). I woke up today feeling good and i’ve been able to enjoy some really good talks.

Tomorrow is pretty “light” on stuff I want to see, so I may attempt to book an earlier flight home (or, at least, go to the airport early). I hope to get a bit of tourist-ing done tonight and/or tomorrow.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, i think. I hope you enjoyed reading =).

Blog Spam

Posted on September 13, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

ApacheCon Presentation Accepted!

Posted on July 17, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

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Posted on May 22, 2006 | Filed Under Friends, Nerding Out, Vacation

Just in case there was any doubt

Posted on February 20, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out

You must be mistaken…

Posted on January 28, 2006 | Filed Under Randomness, Friends, Nerding Out

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Posted on January 28, 2006 | Filed Under Nerding Out