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I've made it to Vancouver, and I'm (probably) going to be spending my whole time in this city sleeping here at Genna's house. Genna's house is in Richmond, which is a very suburban area in the southern part of Vancouver. It's ultra-neat-and-tidy, ultra-spread-out, and ultra-middle-America-of-Canada. Being back in the suburbs — and back in a house with a family — is a big change from the many hostels I've been staying at lately, but it's a nice and a very welcome change.

Steven bought this while we were waiting for our flight to Vancouver, in the terminal at San Francisco airport. It looks like a diluted kind of orange-juice drink, but it proudly proclaims on the label: "contains no juice". Wow, a drink with no juice — just what I was looking for! No juice at all, eh? That's pretty extreme: even more so than, for example, "may contain traces of juice". I tell you what: I'm leaving this crazy country real soon, but it's not soon enough.

599 is one flight number that I'm not going to forget for a long time. My flight from San Francisco to Vancouver was meant to leave at 12:25pm today. After boarding one aircraft, getting kicked off it and being sent back into the terminal, waiting for a long time, and boarding a second aircraft, we finally took off just after 7pm. So instead of arriving in Vancouver by 3pm, as I originally intended, I was out of the airport by about 9:30pm. This must have been the longest "express" flight from SF to Vancouver known to mankind. It was a long and boring day.

This morning was not only a hectic rush, but also a major pain in the behind. After a hurried breakfast, I power-walked from The Green Tortoise, down to my friend at Millenium Technical Services, who needed my hired laptop back today. MTS didn't open until 9:30am, and I had to be back at the Tortoise at 10am, to catch my shuttle to the airport, so that I could catch my plane to Vancouver, which was scheduled to fly out at 12:25pm. All went well in terms of timing: I made it to MTS; I gave the laptop back; and I made it back to the Tortoise in time to catch the shuttle. The only bad thing that came out of this morning's activities was a Wells Fargo cheque for USD$300.

I already knew that the whole world is Jewish; but what I didn't know is that the whole world also has Jewish connections in East Lindfield, Sydney, Australia. I was sitting on the Caltrain back to San Francisco (from Sunnyvale) this evening, and I couldn't help but overhear a girl nearby talking about how she's Jewish, and about how she's got family in Australia. When I went over and talked to her, I discovered that as well as this, she's also the first cousin of Debbie and Benny Geyer, who are old family friends of mine, and who have lived around the corner from me for a good part of my life.

Well, OSCMS 2007 has now finished, and it was an absolute blast. PHP kicked ass, Drupal kicked ass, and Open Source in general (and its grand plans for world domination... bwahahaha) kicked ass. In case any of you have missed these, here is: a link to my slides from my presentation on site structuring and navigation in Drupal; as well as links to some collections of resources from the summit.

Spent all day today down at the Sunnyvale Sheraton, where the Drupal folks managed to hire out a big room, and to fill it with an abundance of Wi-fi, coffee, and donuts. So that we could conduct the Drupal Hackfest. The day was a great success, with close to 100 developers churning away code throughout the room, and working through the core issue queue, and with three core committers present to help get those patches in once and for all, by making core CVS commits.

Wasn't feeling too good today. Crap in my throat, could barely talk, and quite tired. Must have been the oversupply of meeting and greeting and drinking, and the shortage of sleep, that I experienced over the past two days at DrupalCon. The weather was also rather unspectacular today. So I just took it easy at the Green Tortoise here in SF, drank lots of tea, and spent most of the day using the free Wi-Fi here to update this blog.

More of the same, really, except that some of it I did myself. After the big night out and the motel room crash last night, I was feeling pretty wasted; but I managed to get through the day, and to pull off my presentation reasonably well.

After Day 1 of DrupalCon finished, we all went down to the Sunnyvale Sheraton for some drinks and mingling, and then we continued on to the Firehouse bar-slash-restaurant for more of the same. By the time we were done drinking and mingling, I'd missed the last Caltrain back to San Francisco. Luckily, the very kind and magnanimous Bill Fitzgerald let me crash on his motel room couch for the night. So I spent one night in Sunnyvale itself!