Here's another batch of photos from YAPC NA in Chicago.

Allright, been a bit busy since my last writeup on sunday morning. Right now I'm in the hall at the conference center, waiting for the Perl debugger talk to end, so I can get into the useful testing of databases talk. The network is broken again, so I'm writing this on Tomboy, and I'm going to transfer it to the journal once I get online again.

After breakfast on sunday, we checked out of the hotel, and tok the train out to the Illinois Institute of Technology. We had a little trouble finding our dorms, but some nice campus police helped us out, so we managed to check in, and get our wireless access up.

The dorms are nice enough, if you're into concrete and metal. They are clean and spaceous, if a little sterile. All in all not bad. After checking in, we hooked up with Clkao, who needed somewhere to store his luggage until Jesse Vincent arrived. We put his stuff in our room, and headed over to the cantina, where we hung out and hacked for a couple of hours until registration. Actually, Thore was playing some strange card game with some of the other attendants. I did some hacking on the Catalyst-Model-Jifty-DBI module I released yesterday, and Clkao finished his SVK slides :) Ingy also came by, and I talked to his brother for a while.

Registration was a big mess, but we somehow managed to get ahold of our badges, then headed over to the welcome dinner. I think I should have gone to the anti-welcome dinner instead, because the food didn't really agree with me. Still, they had good beer there (Another micro brewery). We headed back early, just before a small storm broke out, and I ended the night hacking in the lobby with hachi, while thunder and lightning roared around us.

I think yesterday must have been one of the longest days in my life. Actually, it started on friday, CET back in Oslo, when I made the brilliant decision to pull an allnighter and prepare for the conference/travel. I figured I would be able to sleep on the plane. Managed the allnighter fine, packaged everything I needed, prepared the laptop, and I didn't fall asleep. Unfortunately, I didn't sleep much on the plane either, as economy class isn't made for 6'2" tall people like me. :/ So, by the time we got to Chicago, 12:00 midday, I'd more or less already been up 34 hours.

So, I'm keeping it going the last night before I got to YAPC NA. I've decided to adjust to the time difference by sleeping on the flight. I'm leaving for the airport in about 3 hours.

Guess you won't be hearing from before sunday, when we arrive at the SSV dorms which have wireless. Meanwhile here's a nice plant from my mother's garden to entertain you.

We've returned to Oslo today, after 9 relaxing days of vacation in Russia. For once, I actually managed to stay disconnected from the internet for the entire duration of my vacation, which means this has been my longest disconnect in quite a while. Luckily, they have plenty of vodka in Russia to remedy the situation :) Anyways, now I'm back, and ready to go to work tomorrow. I'm actually quite looking forward to it. We've taken a bunch of pictures from russia, so expect a lot of that stuff on my flickr stream in the weeks to come, as I manage to sift through and photoshop it all.

This one was taken on our long weekend in Latvia this easter. We were visiting olga's cousin, and her family, and they took us out to this beach. We passed the dude in the water about 2 minutes before he went into the water. It must have been a quite cold pleasure.