The first thing I need to say is that it's so nice to see so much green. Portland's downtown is beautiful with big maple and oak trees lining the downtown streets. The riverfront park that separates downtown from the Willamette River stretches quite a ways and provides the path from the hotel I'm staying at to the conference location. It's hard to believe that Portland and Oregon have the highest unemployment rates for US cities and states. It's such a great town, who wouldn't want to locate a business here?

The conference has been been a good experience. I'm a geek, or at least an aspiring geek, and had worries that the conference would be over my head. I had pictures of alpha geeks hacking my laptop over the wireless connection. I was afraid to ask any questions for fear of the kind of derision SNL's Jimmy Fallon's character, Nick Burns your company's computer guy, dishes out. Luckily, my experience has been far from my original expectations. I've had a great time, and have been able to talk to a few of the authors and developers that have written articles that helped me to learn the PHP programming language and the MySQL database server.

Here are pictures and coverage from the O'Reilly site.