OSCon 2006, Day 0 (The weekend before)

The day is more or less done. I just pulled off my shoes, and as the left one came off, I heard something inside it that sounded like falling sand. I upended my shoe over the trash can... and emptied out a pinch of volcanic dust.

But let's begin at the beginning.

The O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention is being held this week in Portland, Oregon, and for the first time since 2002, I am able to attend. The Employer embraces the idea of training and professional development (like The Previous Employer did, when times were flush), and pays for one conference per year. I had such a blast at OSCon in 2000-2002 that there was no question which one I would pick. It hurt to miss three in a row, and I'd set my mind on going this year, even if it meant burning vacation time and my own cash. Fortunately, that wasn't necessary.

The first time I attended the OSCon was probably the most historically important year to do so: 2000. (It was also known as 'OSCon 19100', for reasons that seem obscure now.) That was the year that Jon Orwant threw his now famous "perfectly controlled tantrum" (as Larry Wall put it), methodically dashing coffee cups against the wall; prompting those assembled to decide to begin work on Perl 6, rather than let the Perl community wither and die.

Fast-forward six years, and Perl 6 is still vapor, though vapor with a shape and the beginnings of some substance. The frustration of waiting for the new version to arrive reminds me of the long hard slog towards Mozilla 1.0. (In fact, the parallels are striking, and lead to some interesting predictions; I should write about that sometime.)

It's an unintended sign of my expectations regarding Perl 6 that, when it came to selecting some technical reading for the trip, I chose Programming Ruby. (Though I still brought copies of Perl Best Practices and Higher Order Perl for Damian and MJD to autograph.)

Books in hand, I arrived at Portland International on Friday night. Having learned from past OSCons, I had planned time for the weekend before for 'tourist stuff'. At OSCon 2000, I had naively assumed that I would have time to tool around Monterey in the evenings; I underestimated the number of evening activities that the conference involved, and wound up seeing very little of the host city. I also rented a car for the week, but hardly used it at all.

In 2001, the conference moved to San Diego, and I arranged to stay through Sunday. Of course, I had forgotten just how wrung out I was by the end of last year's con, and wound up seeing and doing very little due to exhaustion. Also, I'd made the mistake of making a long walk to the nearest (for a very large value of 'near') grocery store at the beginning of the con, and was sore-footed for the rest of the week. I was in no mood for sight-seeing come Saturday.

I got smart in 2002: I arranged tourist time before the con. I also arranged to have a car for the weekend, but turned it in the day the conference began. In all, that year's planning was a win, allowing me to spend an entire day at the San Diego Zoo. The sole miscalculation: no sunblock. My poor scalp, lacking a protective layer of hair, was blasted to a brilliant crimson. You could read by the glow. It left me with chills, disrupted my sleep, and on day three of the con, it began to peel.

It's an indication of what a terriffic event OSCon is that I still managed to enjoy myself greatly, all three times. But clearly, some fine-tuning was still needed.

So this year, my first in Portland, I came forewarned. Because of my four-day-a-week schedule with The New Employer, I was able to get away Friday afternoon, arriving at PDX at 8:30pm local time. Despite a few wrong turns, I found my way to the hotel across from the Oregon Convention Center.

I had been looking forward to escaping from Houston in July, but July wasn't about to let me get away that easily: the high for Friday was 99, and it topped 100 both Saturday and Sunday. A co-worker had warned me of his own summer trip to Portland, where he experienced similar heat: it was made worse for him by the fact that in Portland, many sites, and many cars, lacked air-conditioning. (As someone who's lived all his life south of the Mason-Dixon, buying a car without airco sounds as crazy as forgetting to get one with an engine.)

But that wasn't the case for me: both the rental car and the hotel room came well-equipped. The room even came with a floor-standing fan, and both airco and fan were going full blast when I got in.

(More to come...)