Funemployment Part 2: What to do with your time.

After leaving Jelsoft I was in no real hurry to find a job, I was fortunate enough to have some savings from when the company was sold. The end result was me gallivanting around Europe and North America, leaning some new skills and cooking lots. I also did a bit of work towards PHP 6 but that's not too interesting. I might as well blog about what a funemployed person does.

I'll first take a moment to give a nod to dopplr which I use to keep track of all my trips. I'd probably have missed some without it. Photos are included where appropriate and safe for work.

Glasgow, June 30th - July 6th

 

The first stop was back home for my sister's graduation, she's now a qualified dentist and spends her days inflicting pain on poor children in exchange for money. The rest of the time was spent catching up with friends and family.

NYC / Providence, July 9th - July 15th

My first foreign funemployment trip. I took the time to do some touristy stuff that I failed to when I was in NYC the previous year. The usual suspects were the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I also frequented a few bars and played a game of football with Chris. The last leg was a visit to Providence where I hung out with my high school friend James and generally drank at his favourite bar.

Madrid, August 7th - August 9th

 

Some consulting work took me to Madrid for the day, but since Amanda (weinermobile girl) was there studying Spanish I decided to stay around for the weekend and explore. The picture is of the best calamari ever from a little tapas place that I've since forgotten the name of!

Sankt Augustin, August 21st - August 23rd

   

I attended FrOSCon for the first time and gave the initial draft of Getting Involved with the PHP Project. The photo here was from the party later on where it was decided that we should see how large of a glass pyramid we should have. We should have stopped here, the next glass toppled the lot and every glass broke :)

Valencia, August 25th - August 30th

 

This is the part where I run off with the cute girl and throw tomatoes, Amanda's words not mine. La Tomatina is basically a giant food fight held in Buñol each year. For a whole hour the town centre turns into pandemonium as trucks drop off loads of tomatoes for everyone to throw, one can expect to be knee deep in water and tomatoes, and shirtless by the end. The photo is fuzzy because the waterproof camera got a little steamed up.

After the tomato fight it was back to Valencia for some sight seeing and exploring, unfortunately every August the entirety of Spain essentially shuts down and the locals go on holiday. The end result was a very lazy week, we might as well have been in a cave.

San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, DC, NYC September 19th - October 7th

 
 

Codeworks was an epic conference that encompassed 7 cities in the space of 2 weeks, rather than the attendees coming to the speakers, the speakers were coming to the delegates. Due to a mixup in my flights I ended up getting to San Francisco a few days early so Amanda and I had time to do some sightseeing. The most obvious being Alcatraz, the elePHPant and I were imprisoned for misbehaving. San Francisco also has some great places to have brunch, these include unlimited mimosas. Places for dinner include Houstons and La Trappe, both have great food and the latter has a vast beer selection.

The rest of Codeworks was a long two weeks of drinking, sleeping and travelling. Flying every two days made me appreciate that sometimes staying at home is a good thing. Highlights were the cigar shop and sugar cane mojitos in Miami and the Beer Table in NYC.

Manchester, October 9th - October 11th

 

On the back of Codeworks I spoke at PHPNW with my now finished version of the Getting Involved talk, it was nice to catch up with everyone and the open bar sponsored by the Sun on the Saturday got a little out of hand. This is based on people filling me in on what exactly happened the night before.

San Jose, October 19th - October 25th

 

I wasn't speaking at ZendCon this year but went along to San Jose as my alter ego Helgi. The best thing to happen here was the Bing party hosted at Ruby Skye by Microsoft, the attendees of ZendCon were able to crash this thanks to our good friend Josh Holmes from Microsoft. John and I hatched an idea to hire a party bus to take us all there, Josh then stepped up and paid for it.

One piece of advice when getting on a party bus filled with alcohol is don't wear a kilt, I apologise to anyone there who required therapy or at least some mind bleach after that night.

Glasgow, October 30th - November 1st

 

For halloween(ie) I took Helgi and Johanna to Glasgow, Helgi and I are dressed as Iceman and Goose from TopGun. We purchased our costumes from a Navy surplus store in the US. I even shaved off my beard for the event, I take the holiday that seriously. The porn-tache was removed immediately after that night.

Glasgow, November 6th - November 13th

Another visit home requested by my mum since she hadn't seem my since July, I used the time to catch up with friends and travel north to Stonehaven to get an eyetest and pick out new glasses. Not a very thrilling funemployment activity but something that needed to be done.

Karlsruhe, November 15th - November 18th

 

A bar with a slide going from the top floor to the basement? All I can say is Awesome! IPC was an opportunity to catch up with some European PHP speakers and friends who don't always make it over to some of the American conferences.

NYC, November 19th - November 21st

 

I flew to NYC for the third time this year to meet a cool new startup. Social activities were dinner and drinks with Nate and Chris, and another game of football with Chris. A lot was fit into such a small amount of time in the city, I'm really starting to like the place.

San Francisco, November 22nd - November 25th

No pictures for this one since it was such a fleeting visit, I met with two more Bay Area based companies about a position. Nothing much more to say here without giving too much away. I'd recommend not falling asleep on the last Caltrain of the night and missing your stop, my body was clearly starting to reject the timezone abuse.

Providence, November 26th - November 27th

 

My first US based Thanksgiving was with James and his girlfriend Steph in Providence, you can tell that it was a student event by the plastic plates and cups. I took the time to visit Boston and have a wander, it's pretty damn cold compared to the west coast.

San Francisco, November 28th - November 29th

With such a short time back here it was a case of catching up with a few friends in the city and doing laundry, not very interesting but I do need to have some downtime.

Seattle, November 30th - December 4th

 

The last part of this trip was to Seattle to attend the Microsoft hosted Web Developer Summit. Each year Microsoft invite a cross section of the PHP community and solicit feedback for the initiatives within the company as well as asking for any criticisms. Presentations were varied and covered a fair amount of teams within Microsoft, the more interesting part for me was the SQL Server stuff.

My only main criticism is where is the SQL Server driver for Linux / Mac? We don't need a PHP specific one, if there is a generic one written in C then people will step up to write language bindings for PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. The response is that they've heard this and are working to address it.

Conclusion

I had a great time visiting 14 cities, some of them multiple times. In total during my funemployment I traveled around 55,000 miles by plane. The other things I did was learn to play the guitar (I still suck) and started a food blog which I'm currently trying to catch up with.

Funemployment has been great for me, I'm recharged and motivated to get back into working on PHP and some more fun stuff. One more post tomorrow on ending my funemployment.

Comments

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looks like you had a great time Scott, cheers to you

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I'm envious of your adventures, Scott. Looking forward to part 3. :)

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The restaurant in Madrid was called Maceiras. Si!

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That Bing party totally rocked. And oh... the bus.. what a ride!

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