Lorien's grandfather is in the hospital, apparently he fell off a roof, I'm off to the hospital.
Well I had to pick up a new server, and since I had to buy a lot of horsepower (and had the money to do it), I got a pretty big system:
And yes, that is 16 Gb of physical memory.
I came down with a nasty cold on Saturday. Actually, on Friday I knew it was coming, I had that scratchy feeling in my throat. By Saturday afternoon it hit hard, and I spent the entire day yesterday resting. I'm still not over it, though. The coughing is the worst part.
Well, I can't say I like Windows Vista, but I do enjoy playing the new Texas Hold'em game you can get with Vista. It's fun, and I can end up winning a game now and then, unlike non-virtual Hold'em.
Today at 10 I fly back home. I had a great time at the conference, and learned a whole lot. It will take me several days to go through all the material I took notes on, and follow all the links that I recorded. By that time, all the sessions I couldn't attend will be posted on the website and I can start going through those.
And here's a little something I ran across accidentally last night—glTail, an openGL real-time log monitor. It looks pretty interesting.
Today (at one of the bookstores I visited) I learned about the Google Pinyin program. It lets you type entire phrases quickly in Chinese. And it's free.
I walked my poor feet all over downtown San Francisco today. I took the free hotel shuttle to the San Francisco airport and caught the BART train to the Civic Center station. Adam (my cow-orker that came here with me) and I walked to Japantown to check out some stores and had a nice lunch. I had Kitsune Udon and some California rolls and just a little bit too much wasabi. I always seem to make that mistake.
Anyway, we parted ways there and I took a taxi to Chinatown (it was an even longer walk than it was to Japantown). I walked all up and down the streets looking for bookstores. I found four of them, but none of them had the books I'm looking for, which was a terrible disappointment. They had a newer version of some, but not the ones I wanted that will complete my collection and look great together on my shelf.
I stunned the locals with my mad Chinese skillz 
Met lots of nice people, but nobody had what I wanted so I ended up walking back down to Market Street where the BART trains have their stations and got a ticket back to SFO, then rode the shuttle back to the hotel. My feet are killing me, I think I walked about four miles today, on concrete and asphalt.
Yesterday at the conference, Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek Software) gave a hilarious keynote speech about great software, mentioning what he called:
The Formula:
Make People Happy
Think About Emotions
Obsess Over Aesthetics
What I found much more amusing was an off-hand comment he made about some obscure (at least I'd never heard of him) actor and the number of hits you get when you search for him on Google as compared to someone like Brad Pitt. Then he said my mom has more Google hits than this guy, which got a lot of snickers from the audience. I don't know if it was supposed to come out like that, but it was pretty funny.
One of the strangest things about my hotel is the TV. Not that I use it much, but I keep it on for background noise. I get about 18 channels. Four of them are ESPN.
One of the (very) few things I like about California is the no-smoking law. You can't even smoke near the entrance to the hotel.
Well, I didn't pass the test I mentioned before. It wasn't for lack of knowledge of how to program, or even much syntax. Several of the questions asked for free-form entry of INI file fields that did certain things. Other questions asked how the engine deals with things like switch statements when the default case is not the last case in the code block and what happens to cases after that. Several questions also concerned the nth argument of some arbitrary function, or required intimate knowledge of lesser-known array functions.
What a bunch of crap. I can write great code anyway. I don't have to memorize API functions and INI settings I don't use, and when I need to use array functions I'll look up the argument order. I don't need to know how the engine processes things when you feed it bad code—I refactor bad code when I see it so I don't run it.
Bah.
My cat, Mr. Pookies, passed away suddenly last night. Lorien called me around half past midnight last night in tears.
He was my best buddy and I miss him terribly. He was only about 5 years old. We don't know why it happened. He was eating fine, wasn't sick or hurting anywhere. I picked him up and played with him Sunday morning before I left for San Francisco and he was his usual (somewhat gruff) self. Now he won't be waiting for me when I return.
I promise this is the only part of this website on which you will find any information about awkwardly shaped canaries.
Just helping a guy out, like last time.
Just how awkwardly can a canary be shaped, anyway? How about sausage-shaped canaries? Whale-shaped canaries?
Today I went through the crash course on Zend Certification by Christian Wenz. I met him before at an ApacheCon in either 2000 or 2001, I don't remember. He's a great speaker, and although the course was riddled with information, I think he did a good job going over everything he could in the 6 or so hours he had.
Tomorrow at 10am I go to take my certification test. The trick questions worry me, but I don't think I'll have too much trouble passing—I have been using PHP since version 3. I have a lot of C and C++ experience to call on, I just have to pay attention and not miss any of the small, tricky details.
It's interesting how much PHP has evolved in the last few years. Today we talked about object oriented design patterns, something you just couldn't really implement even in PHP v4.