Whoops, I scared a few people by saying Day -1 in my last message. For me, the whole week is YAPC week because of this Perl6 thing. Everyone else--see you on Wednesday, and don't panic :-)
What a fuckup my flights to YAPC were. They always are. There are no good times to fly in the US. The plane I was to board in Denver was late leaving St Louis, then was delayed in landing because air traffic controllers limited landings due to wind shear. Then they had to fix a generator for the instruments (they have 3, and only 1 was working. They're allowed to fly with 2 working.)
Finally we got to board. 45m into the flight, we turned around and came back as the repairs hadn't worked after all. It's now after the time we were supposed to have landed in St Louis. So we get onto another plane, to profuse apologies and vague promises of "compensation" from the customer service agent, and took off.
Finally we got to St Louis, at 2am. To their credit, the luggage came out promptly. $28 taxi fare to the Cheshire hotel, and I'm checked in. It was 3:30 before I was unpacked and signed up for a $22 Earthlink account for local dialin and toothbrushed and ready for bed. Ugh.
I'm now half-listening to Damian, Larry, Dan, and Jarkko discuss type promotion. Allison Randal's the acting secretary, taking notes. We're sharing a 28k connection to the outside world. This afternoon we move to a wustl room with better bandwidth. Yay!
The Cheshire, where we're all staying, is a 1960s (1950s possibly) testament to Anglophilia. A hodgepodge of English periods, all featuring lots of dark wood. The world's crappest phone system that appears to be throttling everyone's dialins at 28k. The original 1960s bathroom fixtures. Hopefully the bar is good :-)
Sarah Burcham and Ben Hockenhull are running around like a loonie, occasionally showing up on irc to calm people down and give out information like St Bernards dispensing rum to stranded hikers. Only two days to go! PANIC!
I slept through breakfast. It's approaching lunchtime and I'm losing focus. More later ...
--Nat
(ps, if you're coming to YAPC, don't forget to check the weather forecast first. This is not black jeans and t-shirt weather, unless you're Jarkko)
