So I left the hotel at about 5pm on the shuttle to the airport. My flight is at 7pm. I'm in the airport now writing this. Why? Because there was no line. I was the line. Within 10 minutes of arriving at the airport, I was plugged in (to the power) and pulling images off my camera.
Sigh.
Mental note: Don't get to the airport so early. Really.
Mental note #2: Don't leave cell phone in Derek's room.
Anyway, I'm using the time to do some blog updating. Hey, at least I'm not fantasizing about the two college girls napping on the floor just a few feet away in the terminal. (Or am I...?)
Jeffrey managed to mis-configured the alarm clock. We both got up rather early as a result.
With OSCON over, Derek and I decided to spend much of Saturday at the world-famous San Diego Zoo. (Well, Derek decided not to go but then changed his mind at the last minute.) After a nice breakfast buffet in the hotel, we caught a cab over to the zoo. Amusingly, the driver forgot to start his meter, so he had to guesstimate the fare.
(We considered going to Lego Land instead, but it was a lot farther from the hotel, so the cab ride would have been quite expensive.)
Upon arriving, we got our tickets (the $32 "deluxe" ones, with unlimited rides on the various buses and the sky-lift thingy) and headed for the zoo's tour bus. The buses are double-deckers, so we rode on the top to get a good view of things. After riding around on the tour, we spent the next three and half hours wandering around to look at all the creatures. The only things we did not see were the pandas. The line was simply too long to justify waiting.
All in all, I snapped just over 100 pictures of the creatures and scenery.
On the last day of OSCON, I managed to pull myself out of bed on-time and was able to attend the morning keynotes. Both were interesting in different ways, but I couldn't help thinking that the folks at Sun Microsystems are researching the obvious.
After the break, it was time for my "Managing MySQL Replication" talk. It went very well. There were roughly 60-75 people in attendance for the 90-minute presentation. I finished on-time while fielding quite a number of questions. I was quite happy with how it went. Many folks commented that they really like the talk and learned a lot from it. Hopefully they said that in their evaluations too!
As a bonus, the MySQL folks passed out T-Shirts to everyone. The shirts had been tied up in Customs for quite a while, but managed to arrive just in time for the last day of the show. How amusing.
After my talk it was time for lunch. I ate. Again, the food was pretty good--better than last year by far. Once lunch was complete, I headed back to the same room for Brian Aker's "Extended MySQL with Perl and C" talk, which was informative. I have seen this talk at least once before (last year's Open Source Database Summit, to be exact), but there was some new material in it. It also provided me with the chance to chat with Tim Bunce about a few MySQL and Perl related topics.
The final talk of the conferece (for me) was DJ Adam's on "Interesting uses of Jabber", which I've already covered.
With all the offical stuff over, I met up with Tom Lane (of PostgreSQL fame), some of the folks from MySQL AB, and a few random others. We walked over to the Boat House resteraunt for dinner. The place was rather warm, but we managed to enjoy ourselves. Good discussions about politics, Open Source Database Advocacy, and so on.
Following dinner, we made our way back to the hotel and chatted in the lobby for a bit before most folks retired to their rooms. Not five minutes later, Jeffrey invited me to a gathering outside with some Perl folks. Having little else to do, I headed over and picked up Brian on the way. We chatted with Jesse (of RT fame) for a couple hours. It turns out that Jesse is doing RT as his full-time job now and it's already cash-flow positive. Cool! We chatted about the differences between RT 1.0 and RT 2.0 long enough for me to realize that calling it RT is a bit of a misnomer. It's a completely different product now--much better.