Perhaps flying overnight isn't the best idea. Between various factors, I didn't end up getting any sleep. Alaska Airlines managed to deliver us to Dallas about 40 minutes early, which put a crimp in my plans a bit.

My flight was originally scheduled to land at 5:45AM, and via sunrisesunset.com, I knew that sun rise in Dallas was around 7am. Factoring in the amount of time needed to deplane and collect my check bag, I figured that I might be done with all that just in time to catch the golden hour and grab some nice sunrise pictures of Dallas. Things moved a bit faster than I thought, and Dallas turned out to be quite cold (good thing I had my Seattle cold weather gear), so I ended up just heading for the hotel.

I spent the morning helping out with various aspects of the conference, including manning the registration desk. The coffee that I had over breakfast pretty much ensured that I wasn't going to sleep, so finding something productive to do was good. It was a great opportunity to see who was going to be around, and to greet people that I knew as they registered.

The reason that I came on tutorial day was to see the Agile Development and Testing tutorial. Normally I take a pass on technical tutorials, because I can usually learn more by reading the documentation for a project for 3 hours than I can listening to someone talk for 3 hours, unless the topic is difficult or unless the presenter is really good. Titus and Grig's tutorial was different because they have looked at a bunch of tools that are useful for agile development (I was mostly interested in testing), and presented what they felt to be the best tool set. Stuff that stuck out to me was nose, coverage,py, twill, and usage of the statistical profiler. This definitely saved me the time of trying to sift through the piles of projects that are out there.

The rest of the day turned out to be pretty low energy. From our hotel room we could see huge swarms of birds flocking back an forth between trees and buildings. So while Grant went to the panel for authors, I wandered out to the parking lot and tried to grab a decent photo of these bird swarms. I don't think that I got one, and now of course, I wish that I had brought the big lenses with me (I only brought a little bit of camera stuff).

Grant was gracious enough to put up with my skating mania, so I was able to see NBC's coverage of the ladies final. Commentary on that somewhere else, some other time.

I was scanning some blog posts during slower moments of Adrian Holovaty's Django presentation at PyCon, when I found this.

My heart goes out to Daniel Steinberg and his family on the loss of his daughter. Daniel is writing about it: Dear Elena.

In case you don’t know Daniel: he’s one of the great guys of the development world—smart and generous. My thoughts and sympathies are with him and his family.

Dan has been a great friend over the years, even though we only get to see each other here and there at conferences.

Count me in for a hug, Dan.