ApacheCon 2003, Day 2

Day 2 of ApacheCon was great overall, but the presentations were something of a mixed bag quality-wise. I was preparing to tell the confernece organizers that next year they really ought to indicate the technical level of the presentations in the schedule, to help people determine what's appropriate for them. Then Ben pointed out that they already do indicate the level, and I have just been to dense to notice. Doh!

So... I ended up at:

• A very boring session on authentication, which consisted of a summary of the Apache manual. Silly me, it was intended for novices.
• A great session on replication and clustering with MySQL. It was informative and interesting, and I've got MySQL replication religion now. Look out Green River, we're about to have MySQL instances all over the place!
• An entertaining, if silly, keynote by Chris Pirillo. Enough said, right?
• An interesting presentation by Sander Temme on his experiments with Zeroconf (i.e. Rendezvous) and Apache. Oh, how I do envy some of those things that OSX users get to do so easily.
• A review of the single sign-on implementation by UMich, which would've been much more interesting if I were implementing SSO at a university. The presentors were obviously quite competent, though, which unfortunately isn't always the case for university IT. Give UMich a gold star.
• Finally I ended up at another session that consisted of being read to from the manual, this time on URL Rewriting. Yeah, sure, it's my fault for accidentally attending the novice sessions, but come on, does anyone really fly to Las Vegas and pay to attend a conference to hear someone read the manual to them?

Well, with the conference out of the way for the day, Ben and I met Dr Texter for dinner at a low key Thai place with pretty good food. Then it was finally time for me to see "The Strip", which I hadn't had a chance to visit yet.

I have to say that Dr Texter is the coolest, since she let me drive her Audi TT as we cruised the strip, and she even encouraged me to drive "spiritedly" once we were off the strip. The TT is certainly a bucket of fun.

After cruising down the strip, we stopped at the Stratosphere to ride their roof-top roller coaster (which is at the top of a tower, at what they call the 112th floor). The views were great, and the roller coaster was fun. Skip the X-Scream ride, though, unless you can finagle your way into the front seat.

We proceeded down to Treasure Island (or, should I say "T.I."?) to watch the Sirens of T.I. tempt the pirates. It was a silly little show, but fun. Then we strolled through about half a dozen other casinos, but I couldn't tell you which or tell you anything about them. They all seem the same after a while. We ended the night at the Hard Rock casino, which actually has a fairly nice, small, round casino floor that feels a bit more "intimate" than the other casinos.