Day 3: The last day of the conference came too quickly. I slept in a little (missed Geoff's Apache-Test talk), then walked over to campus. I overloaded on those tasty banana muffins before checking in on Jeff after his 85 minute talk on extproc_perl.

We went to Fuddruckers yet again for lunch with a large group and got back in time to catch a large part of Damian's talk, which was pretty entertaining. Town Hall seemed pretty useless, but I guess it's a tradition. There seemed to be too many people complaining about dumb stuff, like the guy who was upset that he didn't know about the trip to Niagra falls on Saturday morning. Of course, it's been on the wiki for a long time. There were some funny comments on the #yapc IRC channel about that particular guy.

After Town Hall, we (Geoff, Jeff, Mike, and I) went to the speaker's dinner, which was nice. I met Jon Orwant and got to hang out a bit more with Nat. Jim Brandt was there with his whole family. He seems like a really nice guy, and he did a super job with the conference. Other people I recall seeing include Damian Conway, Andy Lester, and James Duncan.

After failing to talk Nat into joining us for a movie, we went to see Dodgeball, which was hysterical. Geoff and I got the souvenir barrels of Coke on purpose, so I now have three of those (Geoff didn't want his).

Back at the hotel, Geoff and Jeff went to bed, and Mike and I hung out at the bar until 5:00 or so. There, we chatted with James and Katrien before they went to bed, and I met Gavin Estey.

Day 4: I woke up feeling extremely tired (and thirsty, thanks to the half dozen pints of Guiness), but managed to get packed up and out by 10:30 or so. We went to Niagra falls, which I had never seen, and that was really cool. We ate the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, and Mike came up with a true gem of an idea (I'll keep the idea a secret for now). He jokingly mentioned the idea as a Lightning Talk, and we all decided it would work best as a 5 minute movie that we plan to have ready by OSCON in Portland. Now I need to learn how to use iMovie.

I thought the conference was great, and as always, it was good to get to hang out with friends. It's too bad I only see them a few times a year at conferences. Being mostly a PHP guy, YAPC was particularly fun, because my primary goal was to hang out, so there wasn't even any underlying pressure to have a more legitimate reason to be there. It was a nice way to enjoy a conference.

Pictures:

• Me and Perrin at the Anchor Bar
• Jeff, me, Geoff, and Mike at Niagra Falls
• Me holding Geoff's enormous Coke
• Scott, me, and Geoff Avery at Fuddruckers