United States

The Chelsea International is one of the most popular backpacker joints in New York City. Located close to the heart of downtown Manhattan, it's the most expensive hostel I've ever stayed at (and really, it's nothing special), although it's about as cheap a place as you can get on this island. The only real bells and whistles that they have here are: a kitchen that all guests are free to use; and a nice grassy area and a set of tables, out in the backyard. Their other services — e.g. Internet, laundry, food, airport pickups — all cost extra. It's not the most amazing hostel I've ever stayed at; but it's got a nice mixed crowd of backpackers, and it's fairly good value for New York.

After I arrived in New York this evening, and got through immigration, my first order of business was finding a hostel in which to spend the night. Considering that it was 12:30am by the time I got past the gates, I was kinda dreading this a bit. I hadn't made a reservation anywhere, as — unlike for the South American hostels — none of the hostels here in New York accept simple "online booking requests"; all that they accept online is a live advance credit-card payment, which I wasn't prepared to make. Anyway, I knew it wouldn't be fun searching for a bed at this hour on a Saturday night; but I never imagined that it would be this hard! I had the phone numbers of 6 different hostels: I called all of them; and of the places that I called, 3 didn't respond, and the other 3 were fully booked. Apparently it's Columbus Day long weekend here at the moment, and New York is packed with visitors. Just my luck, eh?

In the two hours that I spent in Miami Intl Airport this afternoon, on my way from San Francisco to Lima, I observed that there are only three groups of people here. Group one: African-Americans. Group two: Hispanics. Group three: orthodox Jews. I half-fit into the last of these three groups (Jewish, but not terribly religious), which was kinda good. I think I ran into the Pesach crowd when I got here, because I saw literally hundreds of religious Jewish families, in the 15 minutes or so that I was walking through the airport. Looks like the entire Jewish population of New York (and related cities) has flown down to see the grandparents for Pesach!

Tonight I spent the night at what I shall now dub the "San Francisco Airport hotel suites". I was in between flights — I arrived here from Vancouver at about 8pm tonight, and my flight the next morning to Miami boarded at about 6am — so I didn't want to bother finding a place to stay for the night, or even to bother leaving the airport and coming back again so soon. So I found what seems to be the unofficial place to spend the night at SFO.

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.