It wasn't the worst travel situation I've ever been in, but 7 days is the longest I've been away from the family since the girls were born. After 7 days of eating at restaurants or out of a box, I was ready to go home. The only problem was that Northwest didn't want to oblige me. Julie called me during the final moments of Bob's talk to tell me that Northwest had cancelled my flight and booked me on a flight the next day. That caused some whirling until I called Northwest to find out the deal. It turns out that the plane from D.C. to Detroit broke down (Bob Kuehne, did you get home okay?) and when that happens they just book you a flight in case they can't contact you. The nice lady at NWA booked me a new flight on Continental. So I got my bags from the hotel and went over to Continental, where I proceeded to stand for 30 minutes at the ticket counter while the Continental agent was on hold with Northwest. Apparently, Northwest didn't transfer the ticket to Continental, hence the problem. And to make that segment complete, I was selected for additional security screening. The return trip consisted of a 3 hour flight to Houston, a one hour layover (complete with nasty airport food), and a 4.25 hour flight to Seattle. The remaining travel hassle was that it took a while for my checked bag to come up, which made the trip from the airport to the ferry terminal a little tighter than I would have liked. I walked up to the ticket booth for the 12:15AM ferry at 12:12AM (ferry time). Fortunately, the boat from Bainbridge was a few moments late (which the limo driver and I saw from the viaduct), which afforded some breathing room. Otherwise it would have been tight. But all in all, being home now is much better than being home sometime this afternoon.

Unfortunately, I spent more time travelling today than I did at PyCon... more on that in the next post. The winning talks for today were Bob Ippolito's 60 Minutes of MacPython, David Ascher's Flour and Water Make Bread, and Anna Ravenscroft's talk on distutils. I've basically decided that any Mac applications that I write (if any) will be written in Python using PyObjC. There's just no way that I'm going to learn Objective-C -- too much platform lock in for that -- same with Cocoa. David's talk was useful because he's been in a product company setting for a while, and his talk did a good job of listing the things that business people and open source developer need to do in order to work with and help each other. I got a bit confused during Anna's talk, because her slides were going by too fast for note taking (but not too fast to read), and so note taking got me out of sync. But the content did look worthwhile. I also took a picture of Anna speaking (I hadn' t taken any conference pictures even though I've been hauling around the family camera) so that my girls would see the women are computer people too. Ed Loper's talk on the Natural Language Toolkit gets honorable mention for reminding me of chart parsing and Eugene Charniak's CS241 at Brown. I'm writing this post on the ferry back home. There'll be more PyCon posts in the days to come.