Okay, so I have decided to blog at least once a day while I'm here in Chicago at YAPC. Since it hasn't started yet, all you get to hear about is my flight, check-in, and the couple of YAPCers I met.
My 4-hour flight from San Diego to O'Hare went by pretty quickly. I had a window seat, no one was sitting next to me, I worked on the in-flight magazine's Sudoku puzzle, and I read some more Intermediate Perl. After I got my bags, I was supposed to meet up with Uri Guttman at the Hilton to share a cab ride over to IIT. On my way over to the lobby, I tried calling him a few times but wasn't able to get through. Fortunately, as I was going up the escalator to the lobby, I remembered something about man tits, and when I got to the top of the escalator I asked the guy ahead of me if he was Uri (which he was).
Uri had shared the flight from Boston with Ann Barcomb, so I was able to get acquainted with them both on the cab ride we shared to IIT. After we finally got to our dorm rooms, Uri had decided to catch up on sleep, so Ann and I went grocery shopping the rest of the afternoon. The grocery shopping didn't actually take that long, but we did end up getting on two (different) wrong lines (at Roosevelt) when coming back to IIT. Lesson learned: orange looks red, and green means go.
Anyhoo, by the time we got back to IIT, it was nearing dinner. IRC wasn't working on IIT's network, but after fiddling around with my box in San Diego, I managed to (1) get irc installed and (2) set up Ann with an account so we could both sign on to irc.perl.org#yapc. Ann also showed me how to use the irc client a bit (I had always been spoiled on graphical clients), and then we decided to figure out where to eat some din-din. Uri and some others went to Rock Bottom, but we both weren't feeling up for American so we walked over to 31st/Canal to Bangkok Thai 55. Bangkok Thai 55 was a real "hole in the wall", but the food was decent and at a pretty reasonable price.
After we got back to campus, Ann decided to catch up on much-needed rest. I decided to fool around with IRC again and read some more Intermediate Perl, and blog about my first pre-conference day. During that time, Joey Kelly checked in, and we meandered a bit trying to see if others were awake, and hung out while he tried to get his laptop on the network. (unfortunately, that didn't happen, but fortunately he had a toy that did work.) Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with my zeroth day. Uri, Ann, and Joey are nice people and quite sociable. My first YAPC looks to be a good one! :-)
