Notes In The Margin

Yesterday, I felt absolutely wretched. This used to happen to me a lot at conferences. I'd get sick the first day or two, and miss a lot of stuff. I spent most of yesterday napping.

I feel a lot better today, but am still very tired.

This afternoon - in about 2 hours - I've got my mod_rewrite presentation, and then tonight I'm MCing the Lightning Talks, since Fred and Fitz aren't here this year. Could be fun. You should come.

The first night in Amsterdam, I went straight to sleep, so yesterday was pretty good. Last night, I was up almost all night, or so it seemed, and today I am exhausted. Which is bad, because I have to talk all day long. I'm going the second day of the "Apache Nuts To Bolts" training class. JimJag did day one.

The presentation bit is here. Yeah. I know. Comic Sans. Get over it.

Lunch was great, but now I'm tired *and* full, so the afternoon is going to be a little long. Just 3 hours to go.

I'm in Amsterdam again. ApacheCon starts tomorrow, and I'll be doing a two-day Apache HTTPd Server training class with JimJag.

I slept quite a bit on the plane, which was unexpected. So I'm going to try to stay up instead of napping, so that I can sleep tonight. Perhaps I'll take a stroll downtown - perhaps as far as Rembrandt Platz. But now that I'm deciding to go somewhere, I'm starting to feel ... very ... sleepy.

This year, preparing for ApacheCon has been unusual. I guess it changes every year, but this year I really would rather be staying home. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the conference will be fabulous. It always is, both as a technical conference, and as a time to catch up with longtime friends. But the trees are just starting to green, and it's warming up, and I will miss my family an awful lot. And I'm just not that exited about Amsterdam. I've seen Amsterdam. I've seen the bits that truly interest me, and may try to go to the Van Gogh museum again this year, if I have time. But I don't care for the red light district, and I don't care for the coffee shops, and I don't have a lot of cash laying around to spend on the admittedly amazing restaurants, so I expect to spend most of the time in the hotel working on long-past writing deadlines, which I'd really rather do in my own home.

That said, I'll say again that I'm sure the conference will be amazing, and as soon as I get there and get immersed in it, I'll have a good time. Just not real fired up about it right now, with just 4 hours left before I need to leave for the airport.

I wonder if I packed my toothbrush ...

Shameless Plug:

ApacheCon EU is just a few weeks away. I'll be doing a two day training on the Apache HTTP Server, along with Jim Jagielski. He's listed as the instructor, but we'll both be tag-teaming on this.

Day one will be an overview of the entire server product, and day two will be hands-on, recipe-based examples, showing you how to do specific tasks that come up every day as a web server admin.

Here's the training description.

Here's the conference website.

Here's where you sign up.

Come see me in Amsterdam. It'll be lots of fun. And I'll be going down to the Van Gogh museum on Wednesday afternoon. You should come with me.