There's something vaguely embarassing reading a Doctor Who novel called the Quantum Archangel while sitting at a coffeeshop right next to someone who has a book titled "Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics".
From the "As cool as it is, it's not worth the money" department, I don't see myself going to future O'Reilly conferences. I'll miss them, true, but they're really more about community than about learning cool things, and $1500(plus hotel plus airfare) can go to better uses in my life than that. That being said, if it were all free and if I were going, my schedule would look like this:
==Tutorials==
- Monday morning: dconway's Seven Principles of Better API Design
- Monday afternoon: dconway's Mastering vim OR mjd's Higher-Order Perl
- Tuesday morning: Alan Turoff's Intro to Haskell OR Cliff Schmidt's Just Enough IP Law to Manage an OSS Project. This is kind of the "dud timeslot"
- Tuesday afternoon: Scott Davis' Rolling Your Own Google Maps OR DConway's More Perl Best Practices
- Intro stuff, which is always fun
- OmniTI's PostgreSQL case study OR Google's Summer of Code OR Perl DBI OR Ruby on Rails makes Multiplayer Game
- State of the Linux Kernel
- Mind like Water
- Skipping this Slot
- Perl Lightning Talks
- Sun's Embedded Database Systems OR Surviving Poisonous People
- Reception
- Multimaster Replication for Postgres OR Subversion Best Practices
- TimeTravel Tables using Postgres OR Relational Object Driver
- Google's TBD OR Perl6 Update OR Writing Portable C with APR
- State of the Desktop Infrastructure (very interesting!)
- Parrot: Evolution OR Intel Platform Innovations
- Conway Channel OR Troubleshooting in Java
- OMG is this talk title and description a parody?
- Inappropriate uses for scripting languages OR State of Jabber OR 10 Tools Developers Need
- Go make fun of Jason Scott at his presentation because he's a jerk OR Kamaelia OR Livejournal's Secret Spinoffs
- Guided Tour of Portland's Bridges
This review of a number of music suggestion sites is pretty cool. I use Pandora right now, as recommended by a friend, but I may start using some others in this list as well.