I will be presenting on what for me is a constant struggle – to balance your home and work life when you telecommute. I must admit that I and my family fight with this every day.

If you want learn more about telecommuting, what is involved, what tools are needed and how to talk to your boss about setting up a telecommuting program, I hope you will consider joining us!

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!

I am almost done with the class and while I will not miss the 2AM wake up (I am on the other side of the world – hate those timezones) when it is finished I will be glad that I did it. Thank you Paul for making learning and experimenting with something so new to me this easy and enjoyable.

So while I didn’t pay for the class out of my own pocket (work did) – for me it is well worth the money and I know I will not hesitate in the future about taking another one on my own dime.

Figure on me disappearing for a while while I get organized and settled – but have no fear – I will be back. You can’t get rid of me that easily. Actually expect me back big and bold to pick your brains since much of the stuff they will have me working on – I have never messed with.

With this move I will probably have less time to fart around with (they actually expect me to work – Sheesh ) but I will be doing more coding and will also be playing/learning more with the database. All good stuff to my mind.

Is it me – or does it seem like a number of people are moving around lately… Hmm.

Hmm.. Interesting how the Internet biggies are positioning themselves.

Tuesday and today was spent running the various cables (they layed these little conduits (like 3/4 or 1 inch) that no one knew where they went or where they came out… turned out they were basically useless to me and I ended up running the cables in the ceiling. Oh and them needing it by Tuesday – change revision 1 . It is now needed by next week, but again I wasn’t told this until Tuesday evening. So the basic cables are run, but no electronics will go in until after they move in… and I still need to go find the things that hold the cables to the wall and look nice and pretty…

Cross your fingers and wish me luck – I really hope I pass.

The laptop worked perfectly fine at home… take it to the office… won’t boot up. And before you say it – no there is nothing wrong with my connection… just bad juju.

Anyway – I am back up and running – and downloading, installing and configuring like a big dog. Figure it will take ~ a week to get everything back up and running again. Have a list of over 20 programs to install and that isn’t even a complete listing – just the big stuff. Oh well.

Learned alot about CSS – though not as much as I would have liked. Discussed with the guys (well faw actually) the merits of going tableless and following xhtml strict, but I really just don’t have the time to learn and code it. For now just being compliant is enough – after all as far as I know I am the only one on my team who is trying to be. Only have 2 test browsers (IE and Mozilla) so hoping the compliance will help with cross-browser compatability.

Found it interesting that it is normally a 3 person job to create a project like this. Another one of the guys on phpc noted that in his company they has three people doing what I am (the graphics artist, the designer, and the developer). Now granted I know I don’t do as good a job as those 3 would – but it was humorous that my company pays 1 to do the same thing.