Well it has been a very long day, so lets begin.
I woke up at 4:30am (a time I am more know for going to bed at), and got ready to be picked up by the airport limo. Because I planned for every eventuality, there turned out to be no need for such planning. There was no traffic. I got my bags checked immediately, and proceeded to the book store where I picked up Terry Pratchets latest book ‘Making Money’. I have a trdition of reading Prattchet every time I fly. I will continue this tradition even after he stops witting, which may have unfortunately already be the case. But I digress. The flight was a short hop and I managed to sleep for about an hour of it (thank you DJ Tiesto – In Search of Sunrise 7). Landed, got my bag, and hopped on the free shuttle. Got to the hotel, and at 10:20am I was standing in my hotel room!
Then I made the mistake of trying to get the wireless working. Two calls to customer support, a wireless bridge, and secondary wireless card later, I was successfully connected to the wireless app, and crashing their servers (I have a habit of doing that). And I am paying $13 a day for this privilege (more on this later). I am up and running, so I start dealing with the PyCon registrations. Nothing spectacular. There are some more vendor and press passes to be made up that didn’t make the press run, but no big deal over all. I connect up with David Goodger, Steve Holden, and Peter Kropf in the atrium and have a decent enough late lunch. To me its 3pm and I am starved.
Things seem to be going way too smoothly. The base network is in place, the power drops are in, and the pallets of printed materials are on the dock. I figure I will have time to get a hair cut after all. I have about 4 hours before I need to be back, so I promptly go up to my room and fall asleep for those 4 hours. Then some more reg work (up to 1005 pre-paid in full registrants!), and a peek at the schedule app. 680 people using the application!!! DAMN! Brett Cannons talk is at the top of the attendance list. By the app numbers we expect over 350 people to attend that talk. That is more attendance than all of Python 2004. That wakes me up enough to head down for what I expect to be an all night bag stuffing event. An event I have been greatly looking forward to.
It’s done. The bags (all 1000+) were stuffed in less than an hour. this is insane. Well it turns out that NONE of the sponsor materials are arriving at the hotel until tomorrow after noon. Yikes. So what as stuffed? 5 items. A far cry from the 21 we had last year, and the 8 shirts. Well we are not stuffing shirts this year. The solution is that we will try to have a separate packet to go with the shirts and hand those out Thursday evening and Friday. We might end up re-stuffing or something. Not really sure what the end decision is, and it will greatly depend on the amount of materials we have from the sponsors.
Things are a blur after that. People decided to merge the tutorial and non-tutorial badges into one poorly alphabetized pile. They did not know that the badges were broken into two sets on purpose, not that they were pre-sorted in a special way (due to being printed in sheets). Steve took this in stride and with some help we re-re sorted everything in short order. The network is not 100% functional yet, but that will be fixed at 5:30 when the network guys get in and complete the job. We have a great group of people running the networking and Jaffo seems to like their work; thus I am quite impressed and have 0 concerns. The hotel room wireless is a different issue, and they are playing some dirty pool, which I will talk about another time.
There were some other small issues of little note. Meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a year or only know online. It will be good to see James Tauber again tomorrow, and I am looking forward to the tutorials. One issue is the registration desk which I will be running the on-site portion of at lest during the crunch. We still don’t have a printer/computer pair which work together properly (my laptop does not like the generated PDF’s for some unknown reason), and there are ~40 unpaid registrations which we will have to deal with. The job of getting ~440 people through registration before 9am! That is going to be fun. I still have not seen Jeff or Mary to talk logistics, so we will see what happens 4 hours from now.
With that I am off for another 4 hour nap before registration setup starts!!!
