RailsConf Writeups: Day 1

I got into Portland with relatively little trouble, although I had actually booked a stay at my Wednesday hotel for the wrong night because I am a brainiac. I got on the road in relatively short order the following morning, even though I ended up getting very little sleep. Also, since I was changing hotels, I got to hoss my luggage with me around.

Although I was tempted, I did not actually catch up on any sleep during the first tutorial session, which was Your First Day on JRuby on Rails

My travel schedule ended up squeezing out meals because I spent what would have been my layover at JFK on the tarmac instead, because of rain. As a result, I was hungry as I get on Thursday afternoon, and you can easily verify from people who actually know me what that means. Let’s just say that eating was a top priority. I walked over to McMenamin’s which had the best food I had in Portland, but I paid dearly for it the rest of the weekend. My feet ended up hurting very badly for the rest of the weekend. And, yes, I was still carrying my luggage around.

I got back for my afternoon session, the awesome When V is for Vexing: Patterns to DRY up Your Views.

I had gotten together with Jon Maddox, my gracious host for the weekend, and confirmed where he was staying. That meant I got to drop off my bags finally. I then set a course for the Joyent Happy Hour. When I got there, it looked completely out of beer. I was shocked, because I started a thread on the normally chatty TextDrive forum and got zippo response before hand. I ended up finding one of the last beers, but it wasn’t cold. So I constantly had the beer in my hand, trying to cool it down in an ice bucket while everyone was asking me if I knew where to find more beer. I didn’t, and there were some real mega-watt folks that I embarrased myself in front of as a result of holding one of the last beers at the first day’s happy hour.

Apart from that, I had a ridiculously good time, as I talked to David for more than just a minute as he gave me a T-shirt. I also ran into the two Joyent Scotts– Scott Burton and Scott Barron. Presumably they picked those names just to confuse us. It was a great meeting, though, because Scott Burton was able to get my straightened right out with the problem that I ran into that ended my first work session on Getting Things Slung as I detailed on my blog

I called Megan on my way back to the hotel, where I hooked up with Jon. We then headed down into the city to grab dinner and some brews. The brew was excellent, the food less so. Especially not cool was the creepiest old lady that I have ever seen telling me that I smelled like shampoo and conditioner. At least, I know she said shampoo and conditioner, and also referenced me. Our waitress chased her away, but then she came right back to me! What did I do? I’ll mention Portland more during the complete wrap-up at the end of my RailsConf Writeup series.