Arien vs. The World

Archive for September 29th, 2008

Some colleagues from work had the brilliant idea of making a group trip to visit Japan next year. Being the geeky girl I am, and being so crazy about all things Japanese, I can’t but cheer at this iniciative and join them.

We met on Sunday to talk about the initial route proposal. The original plan is to travel around September next year, going across the country (north to south) in 15-20 days. We would start at Sapporo (Hokkaido) and end our adventures in Nagasaki or Okinawa, depending on the length of our stay. We have scheduled visits to the most important cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, etc) as well as some smaller towns. Also temples, museums, and natural parks. Sounds so exciting! I hope we have time to see everything!

The trip won’t be cheap, around 3.000€ per person (I bet it will be more), so that’s a big challenge for me. I’m actually not sure I can make it, because financially speaking I’m in a tight spot  (crisis ftl). But hope is the last thing one has to give up, and I’m determined to at least try to save enough money to make the trip, while not harming my daily economy.

So, we have one year to save up money, to gather useful information for the trip (where to stay, what to do) and to learn some Japanese (ohayo!). Websites like Kirai‘s are going to be so useful. Countdown starts now!

By the way, we have an official mascot of our trip as of yesterday. Meet Cosplay Doraemon!

Last Saturday I assisted to the PHP Conference 2008, in Barcelona (well, in Cornellà). I think it was a nice event in general, very interesting and possibly better than last year’s.

Despite being the “Barcelona PHP Conference”, it was all held in English, which wasn’t bad at all. One of the speakers was a coworker of mine, Jens Bierkandt. He talked about how to pimp (lol) high volume websites. We are quite experienced on this at work, having so many visits and pageviews and all that, so the presentation itself wasn’t enlightening for me, but I think it was very well exposed. For anyone interested in the magic formula, you can find the slides of his presentation here.

Besides the presentations, these conferences are useful to know people with the same interests as you. I still think we aren’t enough girls in the PHP scene, but I wonder if it’s just because other girls are smarter than to get involved with PHP, hehe. Had a chance to talk to Scott MacVicar, from Jelsoft, creators of vBulletin (the joy of putting a face to the email address you have complained to is infinite!), Derick Rethans from eZ and Zöe Slattery (yay a girl!) amongst others.

I wasn’t entirely happy about the distribution of the talks, because I missed some I really wanted to see, and assisted to a couple that weren’t specially useful to me. But in any case, I had a great day. And I got this awesome PHP elephant plushie as souvenir. Thanks Scott for the gift! 🙂


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