Back On Solid Ground
Feels good to be on solid ground again. Back from my trip to Florida and the Bahamas on the inaugural PHP Cruise.
The PHP Cruise started on March 1, but I flew in a bit earlier because I wanted to visit the Kennedy Space Center. Pictures are here.
The cruise was an unequivocal success, with about 90 attendees and 12 speakers. It was a bit unusual to have a conference afloat and the first time wrinkles made themselves known, but Marco Tabini and Arbi Arzoumani quickly ironed them out. The quality of the talks was pretty high, better than at some other conferences of the same size that I attended. I ended up taking two slots to give my presentation on regular expressions because it was so extensive.
It was my first time on a cruise ship so I have no real basis of comparison, but on the whole I enjoyed it. Onboard restaurants, casino, bars, nightlife, comedy, and of course new people. All of us at the conference had a great time it seemed and the weather was nice and sunny. At Nassau I tried out scuba diving and it was simply fantastic – I’ll have to get certified now. The pictures from the cruise are here.
Word of advice: if you can, use your miles for upgrades to upper class, rather than for tickets themselves. The flight back was much, much better that way.
