Vancouver Python Workshop (Day two)
For me the second day started with a nice hang over. It quickly subsided but, ouch. One nice thing about having the Friday night key note is that we can use that to give out over 80% of the badges, making the next day an easy run for registration. Any payment problems, or new registrations just shove off till the Saturday morning. It gave me a chance to chase down paypal questions, re-print badges and so on. <div>
</div><div>The morning started off with Guido's keynote and a preview. Again I missed it all for 2 reasons, 1) Paul left the projector at his house, so I went to get it and 2) the great mini-DVI saga. The great mini-DVI saga involved me bitching about Apple a heck of a lot. Briefly: Macbook comes with a mini-DVI port and no connector (btw, the MacBook Pro comes with one). I figured I'd pop in and get one prior to the conference. But wait, my local Mac store didn't have any for the 1.5 weeks prior to the conference. They did have a mini-DVI to DVI cable, so I thought I'd grab the DVI to VGA connector off my Mac Mini. But wait the DVI pins on the mini-DVI to DVI are different, they don't fit. What! I found one cable in all of Vancouver, it was being used in a demo in London Drugs and I begged the guy to sell it to me.</div><div>
</div><div>Why do you do try and screw us like this Apple?</div><div>
</div><div> I mostly got to look after the web track of course. This track was actually not as well as attended as I'd hoped. I think a few things worked against us here. The proximity of the Plone conference didn't help, along with Andrew Burkhalter's wedding. Andrew is one of the main movers and shakers in the Seattle user group and had his wedding the same weekend. Congratulations to Andrew by the way. The talks were good focusing on what people did, not theoretical bits. One peice of advice to a few talkers though, we are at a Python conference, we all know Python kicks ass so don't repeat that. Bashing other languages is fine and good source of amusement though :) </div><div>
</div><div>Hearing that Python is winning over departments in major companies like Ford is good. Another real highlight was Ian Bicking's talk on WSGI. Unfortunately I had to do deposits of all the money collected at the conference and such so missed quite a bit of it. Ian prepared his own hand outs and gave a great talk with lots of detail. </div><div>
</div><div>Next up I gave my talk to the beginner track. Really it was a talk from Joel Burton and his excellent bootcamp series. There were lots of questions that were fantastic and let me go off the beaten path. As is ever the case with good slides, they seemed to predict many people's questions. Then it was off to the barbeque once again at Locarno Beach, an absolutely beautiful location.</div><div>
</div><div>A few people still complained that the price was steep, my only complaint is the theoretical cost for the kids, having 2 kids who came, it would seem absurd to charge them $10 each when all they ate were about 5 chips and small bit of burger. Next time we'll chat about that one before hand. Given the cost of food, renting the location, the bbq's and the other amenities, I think its a fair price. Either way the food (wild salmon) was excellent. Once again thank you to Brian Quinlan's family that gave up many hours to help make the BBQ happen and cooked the food. </div><div>
</div><div>The 6 people staying at my house, then dragged me off for drinks in my neck of the woods. We got to see the fireworks in English Bay from the deck of the Rusty Gull in North Van. After that there were more drinks and good night was had by all. I think it was about 3 am when I hit the bed. Ugh.</div>