I left the house at 0600 on Thursday and about eighteen hours later arrived in Austin. I flew with Delta Airlines and I was fairly impressed with the hospitality. I guess I'm far too used to travelling with EasyJet on the cheap!
When I got to Atlanta I got hooked up with some wi-fi. Interestingly I was able to get my email without paying as I used an SSH tunnel to connect to the server and there were no restrictions on port 22. After a quick chat with Sandra over Skype I was heading off to the plane for the connecting flight.
The only slight issue was when the plane was on the runway, the captain came on the intercom to say that the computer's screen had just gone black and that they needed it back up to be able to take off. That was not particularly reassuring but after a slight wait the problem was resolved and we got in the air.
I arrived at the Hampton Inn at 1800 and met up with Richard, Jeremy and Jessica who had also just got in. To avoid Jetlag after a bit of a spruce-up I headed out with my room-mate Chris Mills from Apress/Friends of ED to get some food with the rest of the Britpack at the Paradise. The food and the beer was excellent and we soon forgot the jetlag. We went on to Buffalo Billiards for some more beers and a bit of a Table football and billiards (pool) session.
The following morning I woke up with a stinking headache and decided that for the rest of the trip I would have to avoid drinking Shiner Bock as it just doesn't agree with me. Still good old Anadin Extra dealt with the headache and all was well.
After breakfast a bunch of us headed out for a trip to the whole foods store which is the size of football pitch. We all bought some tasty organic/locally produced food for lunch and then hit the Waterloo the local record store to check out the tunes.
In the evening we went to a local bar and I sat with Ryan Carson, Shaun Inman and Gareth Knight and we talked about all kinds of stuff from Mint and Dropsend to the state of developing with PHP and frameworks. One thing that's really been interesting is getting to meet people that are well known and respected within the community and it's just about having a chat with people that work in the same field as you do. for example Shaun and Ryan couldn't be more down to earth, just like everyone else I've met so far.
After we all left the bar we went to Breaking Bread with Brad at the Ginger man for more Beer and Geeking out. I met up with fellow 9rulers Robert Nyman and Johnathon Snook and it was another case being great to put faces to names.
Chris and I left the Gingerman about half one and having switched to Guinness for the evening I saved my self from the Shiner Headache!