In the past week I've been in Vancouver to attend and speak at this conference. On tuesday January 20th I left from Amsterdam airport to Vancouver, with a stop over in London. It wasn't even a normal stop over as I had to transit between London Gatwick and London Heathrow by a 1.5 hour coach trip. At Heathrow I had to wait a while before I got to know my gate, for some reason they only announce that 30 minutes before they start boarding the plane. When I finally got to the gate the stupid fire alarm went and they cleared a large part of the terminal... for no reason as it ended up being a false-alarm.

The trip to Vancouver itself went pretty smooth and arriving at the hotel by taxi I went to visit TechVibes with Shane and Peter to kill the time until bed. The next day I took some time to finish my first presentation on Playing Safe and with the already arrived people we went to diner. The presentation went well, albeit I could have added some better real-life examples on how to use encryption and the rest of the day I spend on improving the mcrypt extension API, at the moment it's really horribly with really long function names. Of course, I could have spend my time better at writing the second presentation.

In Writing an Extension I did a live demo of writing an extension, without knowing much about the library I was going to wrap, libident. 90 minutes were to short to make things actually work, but one of the attendees came to me at the end and said that

by doing a life demo he got a real feeling on how it is to write a (sample) extension. Other people also said the found the session practically useful. Dinner with all the speakers was held at a 'Samba' place with a Rendizio, a 'all-you-can-eat' style grill diner accompanied with music and dancing.

The saterday was spend on a walking tour with Damien through the city. Starting from the hotel we walked and took an aquabus to Granville Island to have a look at the numerous galleries and art shops. Not finding anything really useful there we only bought bread, wine and Vacherin cheese to bring to the party at Shane's later that night. From Granville Island we then continued to Stanley Park, the green heart of Vancouver. It was pleasent weather and not too cold. We did take a short cut through the park in order to be back in time at the hotel and leave for the party.

Of course the party featured Beth's famous Margerita's and all of the PHP People seemed to enjoy themselves. Some people, like John took the drinking of the margeritas a little bit too serious though ;-) as the next morning he forgot to wake up and thus miss his plane home. But he wasn't the only one affected by the contents of the glasses and thus we went to find some baked potatoes, which is said to be a hang-over killer. On the waiters question 'Why do you want 2 baked potatoes at 3pm?' we just smiled and answered 'Because we bought 80 limes yesterday'.