PHP-CON: The Return Home aka "The Trip Report"

Wow!  What a really great conference.  I just had an outstanding time.  Here were some of the highlights:

• My Presentations
• Getting a good reaction to my "Getting Started with PHP" class.  Attendance was small but everyone seemed to leave with a good idea of how to work with PHP.  Its the 1st time in a long time that I've taught a beginning programming class so that was very gratifying.  (the last one was a class on Awk of all things).
• My presentation on PHP Subtleties was very well received.  The audience was both appreciative and quite sharp -- they correctly caught a few issues.  Most notably I had not specified deprecated behavior with respect to references).  I'll post both presentations on my site once I review and fix this.
• Other Presentations
• George Schlossnagle did a great job on his Performance Tutorial. 
• Jeremy Zawodny did his usual outstanding work on "How can we make this wacky MySQL database work even faster".  He also covered the new i variants of the mysql calls in MySQL 4.1 which were new to me. 
• Rasmus re-affirmed his committment that PHP5 would be fast, fast, fast for non-oop code.  Good news for the non-object devotees among us.
• Rasmus' Tips and Tricks presentation was, as always, quite good.  And this is the coolest slide of them all.
• I didn't hit a lot of the other presentations due to a) slide twiddling or "can I obsess a bit more..." b) networking with other folks c) general exhaustion
• Miscellaneous
• Bryan, Monica, Tiffany and all the others involved did a fantastic job pulling everything together.  The only real issue I had was that the rooms didn't have wifi access -- but the conference halls did.
• The hotel, the Park Grand Central, treated a number of attendees shabbily at best and I strongly wouldn't recommend this hotel to anyone who travels in Manhattan.  A pox upon them.
• Gallagher's is an outstanding New York steak house.  Think "Large pieces of outstandingly good cow" and you'll be dead on.
• I hung out quite a bit with the Sams Publishing folk since I'm talking to them about tech reviewing / editing work and I was really impressed with the attention that they give their authors.  I've written for both Wiley and O'Reilly as well as lots of magazines and I haven't ever seen such good "handholding" of authors.  Now I know that's not exactly the correct term but I'm not sure what to use in its place.  Suffice it to say that Sams takes damn good care of their authors.  If I was a tech book author looking for a publisher then I'd definitely be talking to Sams.
• There were great opportunities to network and that was definitely one of the best aspects of the conference.
• Much to my disappointment I missed my only chance to meet up with The Nosuch.  Next time I guess.
• Travelling with an iBook
• I have mixed feelings about traveling with an iBook. 
• Positive:
• Found the wifi automatically and without issue
• Small, light (relatively, 12.1" iBook)
• iTerm is a much better terminal emulator
• Cons
• New battery I bought from Apple pre trip gave me a grand total of 25 minute of battery life !  No lie.
• No battery backed clock in an iBook so everytime the battery failed, I had to reset the time from 1969 forward.  That's a lot of damn mouse clicks.
• I forgot the proprietary Apple iBook => VGA adapter and had to hunt one down in Manhattan.  Yeah I got one but I so don't understand why Apple just doesn't say to themselves "Gee ... Proprietary cables are just plain pathetically stupid and we'll not do them anymore".  If only.

Disclaimer: I'm a paid teacher and speaker for php-con so keep that in mind. 

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