There was less people then I remember from last year. I remember sitting in the lobby, in the afternoon before the keynote, and seeing about 5 people. People started really showing up around 6 PM or 7 PM, with a few drifting in later.

The network was down for most of the conference - and that sucked mightily. However, a big hand to the networking folks for taking time out of their (already busy) schedules to get it up and running - it was up, mostly for good, by Friday.

My session was scheduled for Friday @ 12:00. Friday was a busy day - there were about 4 sessions in a row that I wanted to go to - starting with my session.

Thursday I remembered that sessions were 1 hour long, as opposed to half an hour long. Not sure why I thought they were only half hour long sessions - my brain must have been shot or something.

Anyway, I had about 15 slides or so - a decent amount for a 30 minute talk (but not so great for a 60 minute talk, unless you plan on spending a lot of time on each slide).

Anyway, showed up, and when I started (about 12:05) there were probably 8 to 12 people there (I didn't think to count). Meaning it was a decent session size - not packed, but decent.

I finished my talk in 20 minutes, and there were 10 minutes of questions. Gah, I felt kinda bad, but that worked out just fine in my schedule - I was able to go get lunch before the next session started (the Exception Safety in a mixed Objective-C/C++ Enviroment talk).

I was planning on doing a hack this year. I really was. Started Wendsday, and made progress on it steadily until about Friday early evening (the hack show starts midnight Friday night). Then I ran across an issue (very slow performance - like 8 seconds to populate my menu) and relized I couldn't ship it.

However, I ended up writting lots of very useful Objective-C classes/functions. I have this thing that, if I have a useful idea for a class, I go an impliment it, then I get stuck on implimenting that class totally to where I want it to be, so much so that I get distracted from the main thing I was working on. That only really happened once to me, with a few fortes into a new category (based on NSApp), and an addition to the RWError Objective-C class to print the time along with your message.

I also learned a lot about Cocoa memory handling, and how to tell when you've released something you shouldn't.

Oh yeah, took the train there... that was somewhat fun, as always. It's neat to be on a train, but at the end of the trip I was very very sore from sitting.

I upgraded by install from 2.16.x to 2.17 and it worked great. I was expecting to fight with it more than I did - but it only took me about an hour.

Update: Upgrading another installation from 2.17.x to 2.17.4 was even easier.. just remember to run ./checksetup in sudo - else it can't change the permissions properly.