Oops. With the 80's music playing on the iPod, I finally motivated myself to write my talk for the conference. I still have 2.5 hour of flying to go, so it's not like I'm waiting until the last minute.

The talk seems to be of the right length. But I'm worried about the topic. I know I'm supposed to talk about MySQL & PHP, but what about them am I supposed to say?

I don't remember, exactly. And I don't have a conference program handy. And it's not like there's WiFi in-flight (in a few years maybe?). So I'm guessing. Hopefully I'm close. :-)

Right now, I have the standard preamble, followed by a review of MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0 features and development. I then move on to some performance tips. Then I get into a bit on PHP/MySQL advice (mostly about persistent connections since they're a persistent source of "discussion" among some folks). I finish up with some talk about mysqli, the new MySQL API that has been exposed in PHP for use with MySQL 4.1's binary protocol (prepared statements and all that goodness).

I hope there will be questions during the talk (there are always seem to be) that can help guide things a bit.

I love my iPod. And I really love having power at the seat. Other airlines could learn a lot form American. (I just got the battery warning and plugged in.)

(A few minutes later.) Hmm. It's getting bumpy. Hard to type. We're over the plains now and the atmosphere is a bit more unstable here. The pilot is taking us down to a lower altitude. Hopefully that'll help. Looks like part of Idaho maybe.

(Many minutes later.) Well, we're flying over Lake Michigan now. No turbulence at all, but that's to be expected. Water has a funny way of calming the atmosphere. It's a very clear day. Ya know, I'm only a about 30 minutes of flying time from my home town of Toledo, Ohio.

(A while later.) It looks like there's great soaring over Pennsylvania today. Lots of cumulus clouds popping up. I even spotted some nice clouds streets. Their altitude is difficult to judge, but it seems to be at least 5,000 AGL. From the looks of it, one could have launched at 2:30pm and expected to stay up for several hours without much trouble. Amusingly, a 757 pilot probably looks down there and sees turbulence. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

(Later yet.) Well, we're 80 miles from the airport, landing in about 20 minutes (gate 43. My body really doesn't believe that it's already 4:30pm. Hopefully dinner a good night's sleep will help that. I guess it need to put the notebook to sleep now and re-pack things. At least the battery is fully charged again!

Funny note. The flight attendants can't tell time. They just announced it was 2 minutes until 4. Then 2 minutes until 5. And then someone gave 'em a working watch and he discovered that it is roughly 4:35pm.

Heh. That's all for now. I'm hoping to post all this crap using the WiFi from the conference in a few hours. We'll see. If not, there's always dial-up (shudder!).

Posted by jzawodn at April 24, 2003 12:31 PM

Reader Comments
# john said:

Writing the talk on the plane on the way to the conference (and wondering what you're supposed to say). Nice. I thought I was a procrastinator. ;)

on April 25, 2003 11:17 AM
# Ian Landsman said:

Hey excellent talk. I think it was the best one at the conf. and being written on the plane makes me appreciate it more!

on April 25, 2003 09:24 PM
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