Hello from the west coast! I have a journal entry that I made at Hypatia and another at the airport that're not in here, but I'll fix that later. Here's what's been going on since I got back:

I stopped by my apartment, got wally some more food, withdrew some money from the bank, and took a cab to the airport. Didn't manage to contact Athena to see what's up :(

At the airport, my flight was very delayed. Fortunately, it's connecting flight was also very delayed. Unfortunately, I arrived here around 3am, and am operating on very little sleep. I seem to be doing better with operating on little sleep recently though. So.. I checked into Day's Inn, and this morning woke up and jogged to the convention hotel. The first session was about advanced constraints and triggers and the like that can be done with Postgres. This is *VERY* useful -- if I get time to do it, I'm going to revamp some of my code at work to use it, and it certainly will influence the design of the next version of my netdiary software. I was pretty hungry for the whole thing though, because instead of having breakfast, I spent the entire pre-class time trying to straighten out a schedule problem (one class tomorrow I wanted got cancelled). I cut into lunchtime too and finished fixing it, cancelling both reservations for tomorrow and replacing them with a single, whole-day longer class on Ruby. Anyhow, I ran out at the last minute and got some soup and salad for lunch, and grabbed some crackers and a danish for the 2nd class today. That was on Mod_Perl 2.0. I think the danish was a mistake -- I got pretty sleepy for the first half-hour of the presentation, because of all the sugar. Fortunately, I snapped out of it, and it too was an interesting presentation, although it was really more of a general intro to Apache 2.0's hooks with Perl as the chosen implementation language. I think it wouldn't be too hard to apply everything taught to other languages. One big plus about this is that it gives me a *lot* to chew on when it comes to redesigning my website, and maybe if I ever need to do anything more with website design in general, I might take a lot more advantage of what Apache 2.0 has to offer, which is quite a lot over 1.0. w00t!

Anyhow, this is turning out to be a really cool vacation so far. I'm actually typing this on a Powerbook G4 -- a really wide, cool system that has a surprisingly small keyboard for it's size. Anyhow, despite the small keyboard, it's a nice system. The entire lab this year is Macs running OSX, and I'm pretty impressed with their performance. I don't think I could get used to running OSX as my main OS, but it's actually a pretty decent OS, and the hardware is really cool.

I'm getting hungry. I'm gonna check out the Indian Restaurants now. Maybe I'll write more tomorrow.