It is now 9:43 PM. I’ve just arrived home after signing the contract for the PG Dev Summit tomorrow morning. The sponsor will reimburse me later.

I spent 4:30-8:45 PM at the Royal Oak conversing with the various attendees.

I paid the bills of two people who forgot to pay their bills. With this, the waitress gets a very large tip. I will collect from the people in question tomorrow morning. This happens from time to time and it is always negligence, not malice.

Wednesday morning will involve packing up the printer and workstation and taking them to the tutorial lobby so I can print off some badges and invoices. Also needed are the tote bags, pens, invoices, badges, lanyards, and inserts from various sponsors. The bag stuffing occurs from 2pm. Then we move to the pub at 3pm.

There is one delivery missing from a sponsor. I do not know where it is.

In addition, there was to be a delivery from one sponsor to the caterer. I do not know if that arrived on time. I just emailed the caterer to find out.

If these packages are not here in time, they simply cannot be included in the conference.

A sponsor asked for help shipping things back from PGCon. I cannot do that. It can take an incredible amount of time to ship things back. It’s not the time spent taking it to Fedex. It is first storing the gear until you can take it to Fedex. If you do this for multiple sponsors, it is several trips between storage and delivery. It could easily take a whole morning. I wish I could help them, but it’s just not something we can handle. at this point in our evolution.

It is now 9:52 PM and I”m falling asleep.

Today at lunch we had two scavengers. They boldly walked up to the table, took three lunches and walked out the front door. I got the first guy before he left the buildling. The second guy was caught just outside the front doors. Their only comment: we thought they were left over.

One of the two guys appeared much older than most students.

Instead, said lunches went to the Ottawa Mission, a much more deserving destintion than these two thieves.

After lunch, I headed out and did pickups:

• four packages from Barrhaven for one sponsor, and one for another
• three packages of t-shirts from the supplier
• two boxes of tote-bag inserts

All this gear is safely stowed in the SITE buildling. Some of it will be retrieved tomorrow morning, loaded into the car, and brought to the tutorials for assembly. Later, it will arrive at the pub for Registration Pickup, the first big social of PGCon 2008.

I got back to the tutorials at about 3:45 PM in time to see the end of Peter Eisentraut’s talk on Porting Oracle Applications to PostgreSQL.

Right now, people are heading to the pub as Peter’s talk is over. I’ll post this and head over there myself.

It is now 1126. Nothing to do but wait for lunch to arrive… sometime soon.

We just had a break. We had no water. I ordered it and had it added to tomorrow’s delivery.

One speaker has withdrawn. He did not yet have a visa. As of two weeks ago, he also did not have a plane ticket.

History shows that I should expect one speaker to withdraw from each confernce. That happened with BSDCan 2007. This repeated with BSDCan 2008 and now with PGCon 2008. No worries. In both cases this year, the talk in question has multiple speakers.

The wireless problem was not unique to us. The whole campus was affected. It seems the master controller for the university wireless network was malfunctioning. They’d been looking for this problem for a while.

We speculate that this problem was the one we saw at BSDCan on Saturday.

I’ve heard from the hotel which will be hosting the PostgreSQL Dev Summit tomorrow. We made some final arrangements (food, drinnk, times, payment) and we’ll be in touch again later today to finalize things. I emailed the Sponsor of the Summit and passed on the details. I will take care of the payment details if they cannot deal with it directly and then invoice them later.

I pushed some BSDCan papers to the website. I’ve been chatting with some attendees who are not in the tutorials.

I heard from the T-shirt place. The PGCon 2008 t-shirts will be ready this afternoon. It would be good if I could collect them at the same time as everything else (from Staples, etc).

Today is the first day of PGCon Tutorials. I was out of the house by about 7am and settled in at Cora’s for breakfast 10 minutes later. They have free wireless there.

First order of the day, apart from OJ and Yoghurt Harvest Crunch, was email. I uploaded some slides from a BSDCan speaker and pushed them to the website. I answered a query from a former attendee who could not attend in 2008 letting them know how the BSDCan 2008 conference went.

I arrived at the tutorial location at about 8:10 AM. I set up my laptop and brought in the sponsorship signs and set them up. Coffee and tea arrived at about 0830 and I directed them to the right location.

David Maxwell was amongst the first to arrive. David is primarily helping out with the wireless and with other tasks as they arrive.

Attendees started arriving from about 0815. They were keen to get into the tutorial. The room is just about full with roughly 50 people in there. We had a problem with wireless, but David contacted the University and it’s being sorted out as I type this (at 0933).

One attendee arrived and paid late. I did not charge him the usual $50 penalty for late payment. We do not like handling payment during the conference. We have so many other things to do. Thus, we charge you extra for the convenience. Usually. I recommend against testing this.

An attendee, on the way to the head, just informed me that wireless is now working fine.

I chatted with a speaker/attendee over IRC and directed him to breakfast, coffee, and tutorial location.

Later today I will be headed off to various locations around the city to pickup packages from sponsors. Most of these will be for the registration tote bags. Those will be packed up tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, I will be printing the last of the badges and invoices. This should go well. I’ll retrieve the printer and desktop computer from the SITE building, where the U of O staff have generously allowed us to store our gear. I’ll set up first thing in the morning and stay there until mid-afternoon, when we will pack up and move a block down the road to the Royal Oak on Laurier for the Registration Pickup.

Tiph has arrived and she’s going to handle things while I’m out of the room.

Today was the first day I stayed in bed past 8AM since I arrived in Ottawa two weeks ago. It was also the first night I’ve had more than 7 hours sleep. I am not counting the time spent sick in bed just before BSDCan. That wasn’t really sleeping. It was more like short periods of slumber interspersed with difficult periods of pain.

I spent the morning reconciling about 8 PGCon payments with registrations. I also emailed some of the volunteers setting up the meeting time for tomorrow morning. I’ve also arranged the tote-bag stuffing for Wednesday afternoon.

I refunded an attendee who registered (twice) then paid, but decided to not attend. I emailed three coporate attendees who have paid but not registered.

I dealt with some PGCon Dev Summit concerns over transport and the weather.

I received clarification from a sponsor with regards to material being shipped.

I helped an attendee find their hotel when all they had was a reservation number.

I answered some email from BSDCan attendees who thanked me for a wonderful conference.

I sent out some email to tutorial attendees on behalf of their tutor.

I emailed the general PGCon population letting them know the location of the tutorials.

I had lunch with a speaker and helped him deal with material distribution issues after finding that there will be no copy centers open today (a holiday). Solution: we bought USB drives at The Rideau Center, which is open today despite the holiday.

Right now, I’m back at my Starbucks, typing away. After this, I’ll be thinking about what needs to be done next. I’m pretty much caught up.

It has been a week since my last post. I believe I have reasonable reasons for abandoning the blog for that time.

Many interesting things happened over the past week. Many good times. When I had three minutes to myself, some event would come back to me and I’d think it blog-worthy. I hope my memory serves me well when it comes time to recount the past week.

Tuesday:

I picked up Robert Watson. Poul-Henning Kamp, and Doug Rabson from the airport. They checked in, and we spent the rest of the day at the pub. Many Dev Summit and Tutorial attendees wandered through the Royal Oak at some time over the next few hours.

Wednesday:

First tutorial day, first day of the Dev Summit. Also the registration tote-bag packing. Many people helped with this. Keith White. Sukneet Sini. Tiph. Paul Chvostek. Brodey. Thanks. it’s a long tedious job but you did it.

I was standing in the lobby, phone to my ear, waiting for the other party to answer, when I had a fan-boi moment. Michael Geist entered my field of vision. Phone still to my ear, I called out: “Michael!”. He stopped. I quickly hung up the phone. We had a short conversation. I thanked him for his writings on technology law and that was about it.

Wednesday lunch was pizza. It was Colonnade Pizza. We ordered the right amount. Only a few slices were left. This worked well.

Wednesday dinner was Royal Thai. It was wonderful. We ordered the right amount again. I was zonked. I sat in a chair after retrieving the Thai food and waited for others to get their food. I watched the NHL game and we started developing “Dan’s rules of Conference”.

Thursday:

Day two of the Dev Summit / Tutorials. Box lunches today. I kept having to stop pilferers from snagging the coffee and drinks set aside for the attendees. What is it with those particular people who see something set up and assume they can freely partake? It is not the cost involved that annoys me. It is the false/inappropriate sense of entitlement. I suppose it could be entirely innocent upon their behalf, but I think it’s more stupidity or arrogance.

That night we did Haveli for dinner. We had fewer people than expected but we will had plenty of people.

Thursday is also the Registration At The Pub night. We settled in there at 3pm and had a steady stream of registrants until 7pm when we shut down. It’s a great place, the Royal Oak.

Friday morning. The conference proper starts. I arrive about 0805 and Dru is already there. The tables are not. They arrive about 0830 and they set them up. By 9AM it is time for the opening session which doesn’t start until about 0910 as we’re waiting for people to stream in from the lobby. I’m also jiggering around with the laptop and we finally get going. The session was not as great as 2007. Sorry.

Immediately after this session, I leave the conference venue. I needed to do a site visit of a venue for PGCon and there was no other time but now. What more could anyone ask for than to be accompanied by Emma, Leslie, and Randi as we sought out Starbucks and then the venue. We walked there, I inspected the venue, then we all took a taxi back to BSDCan. Emma then helped me sort out some HTML for the conference monitor (the same one that displayed the NHL playoffs in 2007 when Ottawa was still in).

Friday goes well, all in all. I head off to the pub after the last session of the day and stay until about quite late, but leave many people still in the pub.

Saturday: a slightly later start. I arrive about 0900 and we start setting up registration again. More good talks. My parents turn up for the closing session, which goes well. We raise about $1000 for charity when we auction off swag, some of which is autographed.

That night, we hit Paddy Bolands pub. I meet up with some local Ottawa friends and we eventually arrive at Lone Star. I take a taxi home and get to sleep about 0300.

Sunday: I arrive at residence at 0910 to find most people have already headed off to the War Museum and/or Cora’s. A small group heads off to Cora’s. Leslie obtains a bottle of HP sauce. I retrieve my car, and I lead the group to the yarn shop. Leslie does some repairs. We take photos. Emma and Leslie do the airport thing. The rest climb into my car and I act as tour guide for a few hours.

I drop a speaker at the airport and head home.

It’s now Monday morning and I’ve been processing PGCon registrations. It’s now time for lunch with some of the PGCon people. BBL.

Monday - wrap up

Today was a very satisfying day. There were a wide range of problems to be solved and tasks carried out.

I’ve talked to my favorite pizza place and they’re doing lunch for Wednesday. A Thai place is doing dinner Wednesday night. Thursday is a box lunch and an Indian sit-down dinner. This will be great food. Oh? What? Yes, the FreeBSD Dev Summit is pretty much good-to-go. So is the PostgreSQL Dev Summit. I’ll be scouting a venue for the latter tomorrow. With fewer people, we can go somewhere off campus.

Tasks today also included:

• Confirm delivery by PGCon sponsor of registration pack inserts
• Arrange an import certificate for my Subaru
• Visit my doctor regarding the gut problems I’ve been having
• Dealing with a speaker who can do no evil
• pickup registration pack inserts from local printer
• ping some sponsors regarding their inserts

Known tasks for Tuesday will include:

• confirming dinner for Saturday night
• picking up lots of $2 coins from the bank (for parking)
• site visit to confirm the room for the PostgreSQL Dev Summit
• mail pickup at the UPS Store
• pickup the BSDCan + PGCon tote bags and lanyards
• pickup the BSDCan t-shirts
• finalize and sign the BSDCan contract with U of O