PGWest: Day 0...

... or day 1, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, mostly yesterday, the day before the conference starts. Which is today. Obviously. $DEITY I hate jetlag-induced early mornings, especially when coupled with reminders for meetings on the East coast that go "ping" right as I'm finally drifting off to sleep again at 6AM.

Anyway, enough about that. The flight from LHR to SFO was mostly uneventful, barring an APU failure which meant the HVAC was barely working until we took off. It got a little hot, but otherwise everything was good, and being completely cut off from email, twitter and IM for nearly 11 hours meant that I managed to get a bunch of work done that's been piling up for ages and watch the A-Team.

Immigration at SFO was remarkably fast (I've only seen similar speeds in the past in Boston), which gave me plenty of time to queue up with a bunch of other passengers for over 10 minutes before a single cab showed up. What the *$£% is that about?

Made it to the hotel, which took a little longer than expected due to the World Series (I'm sure I won't be the first, or the last to note that that's a really misleading name) to find a whole gaggle of elephant herders in the lobby, with beer. Oh, and one dolphin botherer (hi Rob!). Dinner was at a small, but excellent Indonesian place on Post and Jones where Greg Stark showed up from work to join myself, Aurynn Shaw, Bruce Momjian, Magnus Hagander, Jim Nasby, Rob Wultsch and Guillaume Lelarge.

After dinner, a few of us stopped in the hotel bar for a night cap before heading off for some Zzzz's.

Today the conference starts in earnest of course. Breakfast in 20 minutes, and then at 9AM, a bunch of 3 hour tutorials. After lunch, my talk "Securing your web application" (and overview for beginners) is up, then I have the rest of the conference to see what I like.

So, there you have it. A couple of hundred largely useless words that spilled out of my brain having cleared out my "Starred Items" at 5AM leaving me nothing more interesting to do without committing more hours than I have. With any luck, tomorrow's roundup will be somewhat less of a waste of bytes, though someone did mention beer so I wouldn't hold your breath....