Memoirs of a Roadie

The Sears Tower, Chicago

In June 2006 I attended and spoke at the YAPC::NA Perl Conference in Chicago. It was great to meet up with several people I'd met in Toronto, but it was also a bit odd discovering that I wasn't as anonymous as I was last year. In Europe more people recognise me as I've been to every YAPC::Europe Perl Conference and have been involved in several other activities where people have got to know me. But apart from my appearance at OSCON in 2000 (when nobody bar the London.pm guys knew me), I wasn't expecting to be so easily recognised. It was good to put a number of names to faces though and it was a very enjoyable conference.

There was one downside though. On the morning of the last day of the conference I got called by work. Seeing as I was part of the CPR team, I was oncall 24/7 regardless of the fact I wasn't in the UK. Thankfully I didn't have to worry about it conflicting with my talk as I'd already done it. However, it did mean I had to disappear for a while as I set up jobs to go and do the task I needed to do. I'm rather glad that firstly I used screen and secondly that I'd got all the jobs running that I needed to. As while getting up to plug in the power cable, my laptop got knocked on the floor. Had I powered down and shut the laptop, it might not have been so bad, however, it was open and running. I managed to truly trash the laptop, as later investigation seemed to indicate the bus connector to both the DVD/CD writer and the hard disk drive had been damaged beyond repair. Despite swapping the HDD to another laptop, it also appears I complete wrecked the connectors to the HDD. There wasn't enough on the drive (apart from the photos I'd taken over the first few days) to warrant paying for it to be scanned professionally, so it got binned.

At first I thought that I'd now lost all my photos from the conference and was a little downhearted. As a consequence I didn't take the camera to the speakers dinner event that Josh and Heather had laid on after the conference, and I didn't bother taking any photos the following day either. Thankfully, JJ gave me a program to recover image files from portable media, and got back pretty much everything bar the first day of the conference, which unfortunately are now lost due to me writing over them with pictures from the last day. The lesson I've learnt is that to use multiple media to record photos and don't write over anything until you've had a chance to back them all up safely.

The conference was great though, and I did enjoy wandering around the city. On the first day Cog and I went up to the Skydeck of The Sears Tower, walked down to see The Water Tower and visited The Apple Store, where we caught quite a cool band, called The Ruse. For the Early Arrivals Dinner, we ended up near Wrigley Field, where the White Sox play, while the conference itself is close to ? where the Cubs play. Didn't get to see a game, but I do plan to revisit the city again. I never even took the time to check out any blues clubs, so I owe it to myself to go back really ;)

This year's conference is in Houston, so I'm hoping I can go and visit the Saturn rocket at The Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre while I'm there.