I spent the better part of the morning trying to finalize more items related to next week’s conference. For about the last month, I’ve been meaning to arrange for a shuttle/taxi to take us from the Orlando airport to our hotel in Cape Canaveral. I assumed that a shuttle bus would be the least expensive option, but it turns out that’s not the case with just two people. I got quotes from several companies for one-way charges of anywhere between $70 and $100. That’s a bit more than I expected to pay. Getting a luxury sedan would also cost about the same. After doing some searches and checking several message boards, it became apparent that the least expensive option for a couple of guys with extra time is to get a rental car. It turns out that Budget Rent A Car has a drop-off location just down the street from our hotel. I was able to get a Ford Focus at $27.00 for the day. Now that I’m 25, I can actually take advantage of rental cars!
We had a little bit of a scare today as well. Clark was attempting to complete the boarding documentation form online when it showed that our room reservation had been canceled. I quickly called our travel agent, who had just gotten an email from Clark and was already looking into the problem. It turns out that our confirmation/reservation number had changed on us because we were originally marked as a regular guest and not part of the conference. Thankfully, things were cleared up in short order.
Looking at the conference schedule, I think already know which sessions I’m going to attend:
- PHP 101 (a little refresher will do me good)
- An Introduction to SQLite
- PHP->OO(); (object-oriented design)
- Building Knowledge Bases for Web Projects
- Debugging Techniques for PHP Developers
- Blogging Standards and PHP
- Profiling PHP Code or Web Services Programming (not sure which yet)
- Data Caching Techniques
- E-mail Manipulation and Transmission in PHP
- The Programmer’s Toolbox or Working with PEAR (both sound good)
- Andrei’s Regex Clinic
- DBDataObjects – a New Way to Use Databases
- Total N-Tiered Programming
- Data Mining
- Programming Smarty
Sounds like a good time, doesn’t it!