me talking out loud

Finally, after almost a year, the book I helped write (The PHP Anthology, 2nd Edition) is now published and available through Sitepoint, Amazon and Bookpool.

I ARE PUBLISHED - WOOT!

Can you actually beleive they gave me a trading card this year at zend con?! crazy people. Looks nothing like I do now - back when I was young and cute - but hey a girl can remember. Anyway - here it is:

Now I definitely know it is time to leave Guam since my time here has come full cirlce.

The first week I arrived on Guam, it was trying to tell me something. My husband and I got into a car accident. Now that may not sound like much but considering the last car accident I was in was back when I was in high school (no I won’t say when - just that it was a LONG time ago), it was definitely a moment to remember.

So what happens today… less then a month before we leave Guam… yep - we got into another car accident. *sigh* - life coming full circle.

HOLY COW what a wild ride. I came to the conference thinking I would be kinda busy with the PHPWomen and Zend stuff I planned to do but it was crazier then I thought - and my severe jet lag did not help things. Luckily I still managed to make a number of the sessions but not nearly as many as I wanted - though I didn’t miss a single party

Hmm - now lets see what highlights I remember about the conference…
Day 1
opening keynote wasn’t bad but I slipped out a bit early to 1) find out where we would be setting up the PHPWomen’s booth and 2) try to sneak into Terry Chay’s talk early for a good seat (it ended up being in the room where the keynote was being given - D’uh). During this time Cal Evans (my sweetie) announces that it is my birthday in front of the ENTIRE assembly after the keynote… now everyone knows I am old . So all day I had people walking up to me telling me happy birthday. Oh and did I mention that I was sung Happy Birthday in the bar as well… if nothing else this birthday was memorable (fantastic too but we won’t mention that part).

Went to Terry Chay’s talk (fabulous) and then did a thing for Zend so missed Ben Ramsey’s talk (was bummed about that), the 3-4 sessions I was setting up the PHPWomen booth and handing out some advanced t-shirts to the women and some prominent PHP community members who we promised them to. Then went to Eli White’s talk and I am sad to say started falling asleep during it (jet lag really started kicking in). And after that was very busy handing out PHPWomen t-shirts to the conference attendees for the rest of the night from our booth (forgot to take a picture of all of us with the booth babes)… then on to the parties afterward. I ended up sleeping at night for the rest of the conference in Curt’s room rather then my own since I was sharing it with 3 other people and I admit it… I needed more quiet to recover then our room could provide. Thanks Curt!

Day 2
Slept late this day (jet lag still killing me) and missed breakfast and the keynote. Came down to find a sea of purple shirts… all for PHP Women. Whomever says the community doesn’t support it’s women needed to see this. We easily had the number of Zend t-shirts beat (3-1).

Went to Andrei’s unicode session and again had to run out early to do some more of the Zend thing. Missed most of lunch trying to find all the phpc’ers to make sure they had their PHPC shirts with nick iron ons for the next day. Make it to Joel Spolsky’s keynote (excellant by the way), Elizabeth Naramore’s session on e-commerce (very good) and Laura Thomson’s session (again very good). By now I am once more exhausted from jet lag and go to take a nap so I can be awake for Jay Pipes talk… and manage never to wake up for it. That was the one session I absolutely wanted to attend and I sleep through it… LOL - I kill myself some days.

Day 3
This is the day I pretty much played hookie on. slept late again (never did make it to bed before 2:30 on any given night) missing everything except the closing keynote. Granted I was around before then but nothing really caught my eye and I was too busy talking to all the wonderful people I had met during the conference.

All in all a wonderful time though I will never over book myself like that again. I should have considered how much the jet lag would affect me (I was literally on the opposite time schedule - night was day and day was night) but one must live and learn.

To all the wonderful people I met at the conference (old and new friends) I only want to say - WE HAVE GOT TO DO THIS AGAIN!

In the tradition of zero based indexes I am calling the tutorial day - Day 0. So my day started out pretty well with an awesome Belgian waffle for breakfast. Went to John Coggleshall’s tutorial “PHP Security Crash Course” and while not everything was new (thank goodness) I did learn a few things - Ex: like some of the databases allow multiple queries to be run with one query statement (Note mysqli). All in all, very informative though I have to admit that 6 hours of lecture (even with lunch in the middle of it and finally finding Curt in the sea of people) was harder then I remember it being from school. Will be sure to go back over the slides and notes I made later.

After that came the ZCE and speakers party at 6. I have to admit - I haven’t had that much fun in a long bit. Basically hung out with the #phpc crowd and all the new people I managed to meet. Played pool with Sara Golemon and managed to win a couple of games (she should be talking about that on her blog later - so I will stop there). My only question on that is - why was I always the one who had to ask people to move to make a shot?!

Anyway after that came lots of drinks (mostly non-alcoholic for me though I did have one daiquiri), some outstanding discussions, and lots of laughter and fun. All in all - a great Day 0.

So here I sit another day at home when I was hoping to be on a flight to Zend Con. Why you ask? Well I am trying to use the military flights to get there (AKA Space A) since I can’t afford the $2000 for the flight stateside.

On the pro side - the military has pretty regular flights to Cali so I should be able to do it. On the con side is that the last 4 flights have been canceled for various reasons. Luckily I still have a number of days - even if it is only to Hawaii. Then I can get a commercial ticket for ~$400…

Now normally I would say “no big deal” if I can’t get there, but I have a number of people relying on me… *sigh* - frustration!

Cross your fingers and wish me luck.

Edit: Well I finally got here. Caught a military flight to Hawaii on a tanker plane (got a couple of pictures of the F18’s along side as we refueled them). Ended up just buying a one way ticket to San Fran from Hawaii (only cost $300 vice the $1800 from Guam).